I have taken the past week to retreat into the gestational space of my home. I felt, for the first time in possibly years, the primal need to return to myself, away from all the noise, away from the public eye.

I’ve always enjoyed freely posting on social media, always organically, never strategically. I love sharing from the heart, I love taking my tiny following with me on my journey of growth, expansion and sacred service.

The past few days, however, as we moved toward the eclipse, I felt a need to withdraw. A need for quiet, a need to fortify myself. I felt that this was being asked of us, collectively: to revert back to ourselves, to recalibrate. To not be so loud.

A big shift is happening. A lot of us are shedding ancient patterns, and stepping into new paradigms of reality. When this happens through the collective, it reverberates strongly back into each of us.

Recently, I remembered one time a while ago I went to participate in a hikuri ceremony, and the curandera asked me why I was there. I innocently said, “I want to be of service to the world”. She looked at me dead in the eye and said, “woman, first be of service to yourself.”

One among the many, many times I’ve been humbled by a teacher. But she was right. We all are very fast to be ‘in service’ to humanity, to be facilitators, practitioners, healers, coaches, without doing our inner work first. Without clearing our own channel.

The first and most effective way to be of service to the world is to look within and clear all the baggage that we drag across generations. The wounds, pain-bodies and trauma, the beliefs and programs, the projections. And when you think you’ve cleared the wounds from this current life, things start hitting you from your ancestry. From parallel lives. From all directions and all dimensions.

This is the alchemical spiral of healing. As much as we gain in power, we gain in capacity to clear an even deeper layer of our being. This doesn’t mean we go in circles—each time, we meet ourselves more profoundly, multidimensionally, and authentically than before.

For a while, maybe years, I felt that I’d cleared my channel from the majority of the mud. Knowing that one never “fully heals", I questioned my feeling of clarity and freedom. But I started young, had a relatively easy life, and I suppose there simply wasn’t that much work to do! And then I went deeper. I created spaces of unprecedented power, co-creating with some of you reading this now.

And this allowed the door to karmic and ancestral clearing to take place—of those in the space, and of myself. And I understood that I needed to hold space for myself as well, now, very seriously. Though it took me some time to understand what was being processed from within me, I am now so honoured from this entire process.

The fact that I carry enough strength and courage to allow these enormous distortions to be cleared from my lineages through me does nothing other than break me open into more love. More softness. More peace.

I deeply understood the importance of rest, and integration, breaking another generational pattern of compulsive productivity. The importance of logging off, of boundary.

A photograph from Calder’s exhibition in Paris, where I went when I told myself I need to do more normal sh*t. It’s still very extraterrestrial. Enjoy.

Even if it came as the most natural thing for me, I viscerally feel the energy leakage that comes from over-sharing, over-speaking, over-doing. And, definitely, from scrolling and unconsciously drowning our field with everyone else’s energy. Even if your scrolling is “high frequency”, which was my case, there are simply too many opinions available for consumption on the Internet.

Everything we take in activates us in some way. Clear out the noise. Go outside without your phone. Nurture your real, human relationships. Stay quiet. Be gentle.

And then carefully select what you wish to receive in your field: what energies, what people, what music, what food, which habits. Fortify your field for more containment, less leakage, to become incorruptible and unhijackable.

Remember, you are only as powerful as the quality of your energetic field. Technique and skill doesn’t come close to the quality of your presence. And presence is forged in action, in training and initiation, but fueled by rest.

Divine replenishment is a non-negociable. And I often bypassed it, because I genuinely felt that my work nourishes me so deeply. But nourishment is not the same as replenishing rest. Maybe you’re all already on that page, and I’m just now catching up. But in case you need someone to tell you to log off for a while, this is your clear sign.

This is a very important step in the path to serving the light: becoming a hermetic container, a strong vessel, a clear channel. As one of my teachers said, “a strong vessel, a cauldron, allows for things to cook. It doesn’t spill everything out as soon as it fills.”

I will be progressively receding from the social media sphere, though these are great tools for reaching more of you. But my wish is to create a deeper, more substantial community of practitioners. A school, for us to learn, grow, and replenish.

A seed is planted. Let’s all water it together.

AHAVA

Elvire

Today, we will be aligning to Lion’s Gate, 8.8.8., to call back to us our personal power.

It is being revealed to me, as we go, that this is what today is about. You have heard me speak on power a lot lately, as I observe what wants to be birthed in the collective through my personal and professional process.

I don’t share on topics I simply personally am passionate about. I allow myself to be moved as an instrument and experiment of the flow of cosmic power, myself going through the motions, myself embodying more power, myself incarnating more of myself.

So what I hear being asked of us, now, is this: understanding power, reclaiming power, embodying power. Our personal power, gifts, and sovereignty.

Turning to a greater state of coherence in our field, where what we think, feel and do all align harmoniously to our benefit and that of everyone else around us.

And there are many different levels of this empowerment. One, sovereignty over our bodies, which we have explored earlier this year. Two, sovereignty over our minds. To reprogram our thoughts, as we’ve seen in previous chapters. And three, which we are only getting into now, soul sovereingty. Liberating and allowing our souls to work through us.

When we operate from the level of the soul—the higher self, our essence—we operate from the level of pure potential and freedom. Why is it, in breathwork, or in ceremony, when we have a moment of total expansion, we touch on a level of freedom and permission that we haven’t granted ourselves in the past?

It is because we are touching on our essence—consciously or not. We shed enough density, through the technology of the breath or mushroom, to highten our frequency and finally perceive beyond the experience of our limited ego.

My invitation is this: connecting to our soul is something that we can bring into our daily lives. And it is the key to calling back our personal power. Because soul power is an unlimited source of creative potential.

Because within the blueprint of the soul, lives the version of us that is free from fear, limitation, judgment, and trauma. And I’ve come to find recently that it is more effective to directly connect to this inner power, than to address each trauma one, by one.

This is not bypassing, but divine remembrance of the fact that we are not defined by what happened to us. This does not mean we shouldn’t honour our experiences, and integrate them with love, but that we are much more than them.

Soul Work: reconnecting to our soul, our limitless essence

Of course, a breathwork session or ceremony can give you an embodied experience of this concept. But more important is your openness to this possibility, and consciously weaving it into your daily life.

I offer below a guided meditation to connect to this free essence, the unmanifest potential, that we all carry within.

What I invite you to do first, to make the most out of this 8.8.8. portal, is to journal on the following prompt:

• What does my limitless self look, sound and feel like? What does calling all of my personal power to me look, sound and feel like? If I were to create my life consciously, what would I create for myself and the world?

Light a candle and some incense, set a sacred space.

PILLAR OF LIGHT Meditation

I’ve recorded a powerful grounding meditation, which I’ve learnt with Linda Howe. It is one of the most effective practices for grounding and protecting my energy, clearing density from my system, and elevating my frequency. It is simple, and I recommend it for every morning to create more harmony and coherence in your field.

QUANTUM SOUL CONNECTION Practice

In the (literal) light of Lion’s Gate, where the star Sirius aligns to the Sun, and our consciousness awakens to deeper levels of its own power, I’ve recorded the following practice. I recommend doing this practice as many times as needed—but you will eventually come to a point where you can access this field in a matter of seconds. And this is the goal—to inhabit and to be moved from this level of awareness, rather than from the version of you that is fearful, limited and small.

Note: I close the meditation but leave the music running a bit longer, in case you want to stay immersed in it.

In this practice, we are harnessing our full creative power: our soul to create, our mind to visualise, our word to activate.

Your soul is waiting for the invitation and permission to freely work through you. But it cannot do so in limitation.

As I mention in the end of the meditation, practice calling your soul to work through you every morning when you wake up. Give permission and consent to your higher self to guide your steps, to reprogram your beliefs, to activate your power.

Remember these practices are meant for repetition. Reprogramming and activation needs sustenance of frequency to deeply anchor within the system. So sustain your frequency by frequently engaging with these practices, and being intentional about what you feed your system.

Remembering Human Technology

Remember, our minds, our words, and our hearts, all are powerhouses built to create. What we feed our minds, our minds amplify. The invitation, then, is to feed our minds that which we want more of. More freedom, more love, more gratitude.

Harnessing our human technology to create rather than stagnate. Granting our soul permission to work through our vessel. This is body, mind and soul sovereignty.

With soulful love,

Elvire

It is time we talk about an often forgotten but one of the most important steps of the alchemical journey: integration.

Integration is where teachings become integrated into our lives. When the abstract becomes concrete. Where idea turns into action. Think of it as the tending of seeds freshly planted in soil, for them to become beautiful flowers.

Integration is how we begin to shift our realities.

A powerful transit is occurring in the cosmos: alongside this full moon in Aquarius, Saturn also begins its retrograde in the sign of Aries. A lot of you know the full moon as the culmination, the reveal. But what happens after the breakthrough? Saturn teaches a powerful message: now that things have been revealed, will we build with them? Or are we simply interested in the peak experience?

Saturn work can be unglamorous: through repetition, commitment, through implementing structure into everyday life, we learn to embody our experiences. We repattern our nervous system into a new paradigm.

After deep emotional and energetic processes, such as with the breath or in ceremony, our system reorganises. Our mind has formed new connections, our body has let go of density, our field is more structured.

But there is a crucial time after this work where our entire system is deeply receptive to new input, new programming, that it can begin integrating.

If we skip this step, we are not finishing our system update. We are essentially just having a cool experience.

Harnessing our human technology

It is helpful to think of our system as a powerful computer—I know we are much more than that, but we are also carriers of highly advanced technology.

We grow up with certain software: a specific code, or programming, that keeps us in certain habits, patterns, and lifestyle. This code is what keeps the computer alive and functioning. Whether it is optimal isn’t of its concern, if it works to keep us alive.

And what forms the building blocks of our software? First and foremost, our beliefs about ourselves and the world. These are the foundations upon which we understand who we are, and what we are capable of in this lifetime. These are the parameters through which we experience reality.

As with any computer system, natural evolution fosters updates. And if we dedicate ourselves to our evolution, we find that we have many opportunities to update our system.

Therefore, the best way to integrate new software—whether it’s after a powerful breathwork session, ceremony, or even in everyday life—is by actively implementing the new building blocks into our lives: choosing new beliefs to “run on”.

Our beliefs are the primordial software. They determine the quality of our relationships, of our environment, of how we treat our bodies, of how we engage with the world. Our beliefs determine the outcome of our lives.

Beliefs as building blocks of reality

PRACTICE (inspired by Global Breathing Awareness): Write down your three worst beliefs about romantic relationships, and how are these beliefs manifesting into your life. Same for money: how are your beliefs keeping you from living in a state of abundance?

Eg. “love is a struggle”, “love is hard”, “men are trash”, “women are superficial”, “love is dangerous” / “money is dirty”, “wealth is inherently bad”, “money equals corruption”, “wealth equals greed”, “wealth is unattainable to me”. List a few.

Are you someone who uses phrases like “bad things always happen to me”? Or are you someone that states “the Universe is working in my favour” when even the most mundane positive thing happens to you?

Because I can guarantee that one of these two sets of beliefs leads to a more fulfilled life. And before some of you think, “I’d rather be realistic than delusionally positive”… reality is deeply subjective. Two different people can have two different experiences of the same event—different filters of perception, different software. You fabricate your reality every waking moment.So you might as well choose how you do it, and make it work in your favour.

I’m not saying that when something terrible happens, that you should say it’s great—though I do think that a lot of bad things that happen to us carry massive teachings that remind us to return to love more deeply. What I am saying, as all my teachers have taught me, is that where your attention goes, energy flows. And if you keep feeding softwares of lack, scarcity and fear, then this is what you will be most present with in everyday life.

For the scope of this article, I am speaking to those who have a baseline level of agency over their everydayness, meaning, I am not saying that someone who is actively affected by a genocide is “manifesting” their situation.

And dominating systems of power create programmed thoughts—and programmed thoughts maintain and feed dominating systems. So the way to “hack” the system is to consciously deprogram our thoughts and reclaim our sovereignty.

So the practice is this: observe your thoughts. Observe your environment. And start noticing where you are “cursing” and limiting yourself. And if you can, actively replace your negative thoughts by their positive opposite, when they arise.

Put post-its up on your wall so you can see them clearly. So that the positive input replaces the negative, until it forms the new software.

I am saying this as a living example of updating my system radically from fear, negative self-talk, clinically diagnosed anxiety disorder, to a state of inner peace and radical trust. Little by little, affirmation by affirmation, I now have an inner dialogue of genuine self-love, extending to those around me. These positive and affirming thoughts have become my new habitual patterns. The system has successfully updated. And I still notice in myself when I “curse” myself into limitation, even when I’m joking. Words set frequency. Mind your words.

Affirmations of empowerment

• I am sovereign.

• I trust myself.

• Good things always come my way.

• I am open to receiving the gifts of life.

• I am the author of my own life.

• My empowerment empowers others.

• I choose how I respond to what happens to me.

• I am capable of handling what comes my way.

By observing your negative beliefs, choose affirmations that counteract their energy. Eg. “I have to struggle” → “Ease is my birthright”.

Remember, affirmations need to be positively oriented because if you tell yourself, “I don’t need to struggle”, you are still emphasizing struggle—your mind skips over the negative.

Back to integration

This is a fundamental step to integrating new code. To integrating new insight. Action at the level of reprogramming the mind.

Observe your beliefs. Observe your habitual patterns, your thoughts. And choose what your system deserves to run on. Does it deserve to run on thoughts of lack or on thoughts of power?

Small, incremental steps are key: setting a boundary, starting a hobby, observing our beliefs. This is Saturn, inviting us into the tedious, yet subtle work.

And it is perfectly normal to experience a peak during and after a deep process or retreat, and then feel like your habits start creeping back in. This is where the work gets interesting: negotiating with yourself, weaving thread by thread, the old code out, and the new code in.

Why integration matters is that it substantiates everything we can learn in ceremony. It is how we change and evolve, as humans. And the only purpose we have here is to experience this evolution. To move through the density, remembering our light—remembering that each lesson leads us further into love.

Mind mastery as sovereignty

Mind mastery, or, the art of mastering our thoughts, is key to our sovereingty. Mastering our thoughts means becoming the creator of our human experience. Remember, our minds are constantly manifesting unconsciously. Once we decide that we choose what we bring forth, we move into alignment with creation itself, becoming co-creators with life. We remember the game.

This is a challenging topic to address, but one that I am passionate about because of how important it is. Humans have infinite technology available from within, and for the moment, it is not being used effectively. Our minds are given nothing better to do than to run on old limiting software, keeping us stuck in anxiety and fear. This is a call to remember the intelligent powerhouse that we hold within, and to expand our understandings of human potential.

For now, I’m wishing you steady integrations, whatever it is that you have experienced in the past few months.

With love,

Elvire

As many souls awaken to their power, the subject of humility arises. It must arise, as it reflects our relationship to power in our current reality.

What is our first thought when we see someone embodying their power? I’m not talking about the kind of power that a dictator embodies. I’m talking about someone who stands anchored within themselves, unafraid to take up space. Someone sharing their gift freely. Someone charging a fair price for their service.

What is our first thought?

Humble yourself. You must have only got there because of external help. It must be nice to have it easy. Leave space for others.

A lot to unpack. First things first:

Not power over others, but power with others

Collective empowerment means, I’m awesome, you’re awesome, they’re awesome, and we’re all awesome together, and that’s awesome. Rejoicing and giving gratitude to being awesome, instead of lukewarm or mediocre, and seeking it in our environment. Abundantly distributing love, light, encouragement.

Wanting to be the small fish in a big pond. Being in awe of those who have walked the path before us, who have gained experience through initiation, who have sacrificed comfort in order to bring more power into the world. Showing up with an empty cup—allowing ourselves to be impressed with people. How about that!

Humility—a misunderstood quality

Oh so misunderstood as having to make yourself small, to be polite, to not ruffle too many insecure feathers. But where humility is valid, is that you don’t make yourself superior to others. That you don’t place yourself as the ultimate voice of truth above others. And I have gratitude to my teacher for showing me that humility is more about recognising that faced with the Great Mystery, you don’t know anything or anyone, their circumstances, and that everyone can surprise you and teach you something. Humility is recognising you always have something to learn—from each person and situation.

But to really move on to the next level, and to circle back to power, we need to drop the making ourselves small, the “being humble” for the sake of it. It is not in making ourselves small that we will become gods. Our divinity is nowhere to be found in our defeated posture, and certainly not in our judgment. In our looking for the cracks in someone. In our “opinions” about everyone and everything. Greatness has no room for these things.

It has been revealed to me very clearly: don’t expect great things to come to you if you reject greatness. If you judge it, criticise it, or mock it. And I know we have valid reasons to reject greatness. But it’s time we work through these reasons and set ourselves free. Surrender to it, and let your heart break open as you realise that you, too, can incarnate this powerful magic.

What would it take for us to see someone fully embodying their power, and thinking: great job. Nice work.

It would take us working through our insecurity, the fears we’ve associated to power, it would take us giving ourselves permission to be seen trying, seen failing, and seen succeeding.

Power is revealed through initiation and remembrance

Power is not someone’s inherited privilege—that’s superficial, fragile. Real power is embodied through stripping ourselves of who we think we are, of our ego, or overcompensations, our trying to prove mechanisms, and standing so deeply in knowing who we are, that it becomes matter of fact. It’s already all within. And this has nothing to do with anyone else.

This is immovable power. It is a power that dissolves all misalignment around it. It is a power that harmonises the field.

If we deny our power, we are denying our incarnation. And when we live in denial, we experience inner corrosion. We stagnate, we collapse. Our system is shut down, rusting among spiderwebs.

Bringing ourselves back online

The process of activation, soul-lineage memory, and awakening to power, is a process of bringing ourselves back online, to make full use of our inherent technology.

This process involves a primary phase of purification: giving the system a good cleanse, of all the dust that has settled over the years, getting in the way of good functioning. This is a process of death—of who we thought we were, of who we aspired to be, of the rigid perceptions of reality we once held tightly.

And then, comes rebirth. The player remembers the game. The player—the soul—becomes free to move through the levels of consciousness, upgrading its avatar—the human—along the way. Ever learning, ever growing, ever evolving.

Let’s all empower each other. Let’s be lovingly real with each other. Let’s try to drop the overcompensations, the judgments, the distrust of ourselves and of others. Let’s all be great together. My brothers and sisters, let’s rise.

Remember. Remember. Awaken to the love. Awaken to your divinity.

With unapologetic power and love,

Elvire

[Note: Substack isn’t accepting my photo upload for this post so we are raw-dogging it, unfortunately it was an epic one]

New moons typically invite the planting of new seeds, manifestations, and visions. This new moon, however, is home in her own sign, and fuses to mercury retrograde. Mind and feeling are merged into one. What we feel and what we think are, right now, one. This is an invitation.

This moon is for looking honestly at the scripts we have been running, the ones written into us—once and for all. This moon is for deprogramming the old software, with gentleness and love.

The programs we did not choose

We arrive on this earth unguarded and entirely porous. And into that receptiveness, long before we have language or structures to question anything, the world begins writing.

Be smaller. Be quieter. Be palatable. Earn your worth through output. Earn your rest through exhaustion. Distrust your body. Distrust your knowing. Distrust the parts of you that remember something older than what you were taught.

These are simply the accumulated conditioning of family systems, institutions, and collective fear passed down and absorbed so early and so completely that we mistake them for self. We call them “our personality” or “just how I am.”

And the truth is, most of us are not living our own frequency. We are living the frequency of every unhealed lineage that came before us, every fear-based structure we were taught to call safety, every collective agreement we never consciously consented to.

And there is another, more insidious, layer to it. Some narratives, appropriated by the realm of modern psychology, under the guise of diagnosing and treating conditions that are simply not conforming to our modern (dissociated) landscape, are internalised—reinforcing and validating our disempowered parts, keeping us stuck and incapacitated.

There are many truths, but one above all: deep down, at the soul level, we are limitless. Anything disconnecting us from this truth is not truly ours to carry. But we have the choice, to either go into agreement with limitation, or to tap into the perpetual and abundant flow of creation we carry within—otherwise known as freedom.

And please hear me: it is important to validate all of our parts. But to also see this as a step in the greater process of our healing, rather than the finish line.

This new moon, sitting at the threshold of the Pisces node as it prepares to give way to Aquarius, illuminates exactly this threshold: the closing of an old evolutionary chapter built on surrender and dissolution, and the opening of a new one built on collective sovereignty. We are not just individually deprogramming. We are doing it at the exact moment the collective is being asked to.

Where do I comply?

This is the question worth sitting with tonight, before the moon goes dark.

Instead of “what is wrong with the world”—we already know that story, and it will not free us to keep telling it. The more precise question, which might generate some internal friction, is: where do I keep the program running myself?

Where do I project my inner wounds upon others, to avoid taking responsibility? Where do I perform certainty to avoid the discomfort of not knowing? Where do I override my body’s first no because saying yes was safer, historically, in a system that punished my no? Where do I run away from myself? Where do I mistake numbness for peace?

Cancer rules the body of memory—the tissue, the womb, the ancestral cellular record. This is not abstract work tonight. It is asking to be felt in the body, not just understood by the mind. Somewhere in our chest, our gut, our throat, there is a program running right now that we have never questioned because we have never been still enough, or safe enough, to notice it was there.

Mercury retrograde is here to help us see it. Clearly, without flinching, without immediately rushing to fix it. To observe, allow, to name it and create space for it.

Deprogramming is remembrance

There is a way of approaching this work that turns into another performance, a resistance that is still, underneath, orbiting the very system it claims to reject. It looks loud and very impressive.

But true deprogramming is quieter: it is slowly, gradually, and consistently, examining the truths we hold within, as well as our loyalties and allegiances to systems.

Letting our body’s intelligence outrank our mind’s explanations, even when our mind has very convincing reasons. Allowing ourselves to feel the physical discomfort that comes with that which we try to avoid: feeling the sensation of contraction in the body, observing neutrally, curiously, lovingly.

Returning—again and again, patiently—to the parts of us that were exiled for being too much, too intuitive, too sovereign, too awake.

This is why the sign of Cancer governs this moon so precisely. Cancer liberates through tenderness, through gentle power. Through going back into the place where the wound happened and finally, finally offering it presence and safety instead of judgment.

The ritual of unbecoming

If you choose to sit with this moon tonight, ask what you are ready to stop carrying. Ask which inherited fear you are willing to set down, even just for this cycle. Ask your body—not your mind—what safety would actually feel like, if it were not defined by someone else’s actions, or someone else’s fears.

Journal prompt: What program are you ready to set down this cycle?

Write it down, as curious excavation.

We are not behind, or broken, but simply running someone else’s code for a very long time, mistaking it for our own operating system. The moon returning home tonight is a reminder that we have one too: a home frequency, a signal that is entirely, uncorrupted, our own.

The unlearning is the work now. The remembering is the medicine.

And what gets released into the dark of this moon simply composts. It becomes the soil beneath whatever wants to rise, undistorted, when the sky opens again. It becomes alchemised through the power of our heart, our breath, our inherent light as we remember and reactivate our power.

I know that the language I use can be confronting. But trust that it carries tremendous love, as well as personal and professional experience. And if I use language of personal responsibility, it is because there is simply no other way to really heal.

I will never blame or condemn any part that we carry. Every part we carry has had a good reason to be here, usually to protect us, to keep us in right relationship, in connection, in survival.

But today, as we’ve grown from childhood, most of these parts are no longer as needed as they were in our past. And what is needed is our understanding that we create the safety from within, by tending to our garden—to the parts that remind us of our capacity and sovereignty.

I don’t believe I am of service or in alignment by reinforcing narratives of powerlessness—and I’m sure there are plenty of practitioners out there who will say what we’d prefer to hear. But I am here to hold you as you remember that you, too, have beautiful wings, however long that journey takes.

In sovereignty and radical devotion to the light within, we can do this, together.

Elvire

I have always associated the archetypal feminine with the moon, with its cycles, the yin reflective energy, the mysterious darkness of depth. And I still see the darkness as a deeply feminine space of gestation and transformation.

But understanding now, the importance of emanating as the source itself. The importance of the return of solar fire, embodied by the feminine. Does the sun apologise for its presence? Does the sun ask for permission to emanate its power? Does it dim itself so others may feel more comfortable?

The feminine has forgotten that it is, too, deeply solar. Women are generators of light—and life. And there is a current of feminine lineage, older than what we know as today’s religions, deeply ancient and highly sacred—that understands the womb itself as a second sun.

This is not a metaphor: the womb is a center of heat, of creation, of self-originating power. The womb nurtures life, just like the sun. And over generations of conditioning, false religions, false prophets, and patriarchal programming, we forgot that we are the original carriers of that sacred fire.

This created incredible distortion: we learned to perform this radiance. Seeking what was once lost, we push ourselves to somehow step into our presence—only through fawning, reacting, over-compensating for the inherent discomfort of simply being in our power. We equate visibility with danger and vulnerability.

But the fire has not disappeared. It went underground. It moved into our body, into our breath, into our blood. It waited in the dark—the feminine space of gestation, the same dark that holds seeds until they are ready to rise.

Solstice reminds us that the sun can shine in its maximum power and be tremendously medicinal. Solstice reminds that the violence associated with power is an inherently wounded program. It is a program that we all carry, and that men are the first victims of. It is crucial, then, to also come and do this work together, to hack the code, by remembering our original blueprint.

In ceremony, this is some of the deepest work I witness women do. Retrieving heat, power, the heart of fire. The fire that burns away doubt, shame, fear and illusion. The reconnection to the alchemical fire of transformation. So that each woman returns to her truth.

This is the return of solar power, anchored within the feminine. A remembering of what we carry at the very center of our being. Pure Source energy, emanating from within.

This was a preparative ceremony for the work that is to come in Galicia, in two weeks exactly. We are being awakened back into our inner light source, our radiance and our medicine. If this work calls to you, there is one spot left.

If my messaging sounds like I’m trying to essentialise men and women, I would like to clarify my beliefs: I believe that in our resistance is our growth, generally speaking. And if there is resistance to embody different aspects of us—the full spectrum of gender expression that we hold within—it is interesting to lean into that resistance. I don’t have a particular agenda around gender, except for that everyone feels embodied and free.

And in order to be free, we must safely explore our multidimensionality, so that when we then choose to play with our avatar, it comes from embodied choice, rather than rigidity and fear. My wish for us, as a collective, is that we return our energy to our bodies, that we shine with vitality and freedom, embracing the power and the queerness of the spectrum that we hold within.

For all the men present here: I’ll be with you very shortly. It will be an honour to work together, to free ourselves from the weight of this collective wound. Please stay very tuned.

With love and solar power,

Elvire

This is the natural rhythm of consciousness forgetting and remembering itself through matter. At times, we are further away from ourselves—from truth, from the sacred.

As we feel the distance from who we are, from our source, the great Mother of all being, as we feel disconnected and out-of-resonance with the world around us, we hear the call—and we embark on our hero’s journey.

We might decide to travel to lands far away. We might leave our job, our relationship. We might enter a new relationship. We might get bad news about our health. We might intentionally visit the temples of this Earth. This is not usually a conscious process. This is the pull of the soul back home.

In our quest, we might experience great dissolution, dismemberment. This whole Substack, from its very beginning, has been the hero’s journey back home. Dissolution, or the death of that which we are not, is necessary for our rebirth. As we release our false identities, attachments, and illusions, we finally remember who we really are.

So the journey is not about the destination. It is about the lessons we learn along the way. It is about the longing we experience before we embark in it. It is about the uncertainty that we feel, the negociation that we engage in with ourselves, the bargaining, the weakness, the defeat, and the tremendous power that emerges once we surrender to it all.

I am sure you all remember a time where you went through a hero’s journey of your own. Where you had to give up a belief in order to meet yourself more deeply and more honestly. The invitation here is to remember: every challenge, every initiation, every obstacle and every gift forms part of your sacred journey back to your heart, back to your soul, back to your truth before it was corrupted by false ideas of who you “should” be.

This remembrance allows us to turn toward discomfort, to find the medicine it carries. Because as we expand our capacity to hold and lovingly witness our discomfort and pain, we directly expand our capacity to hold beauty, joy, and love.

This is a journey of strength and courage, but also of softness and surrender. It is a journey of the soul, guiding us toward more of who we are, until we remember to set ourselves free.

Writing this under the Sagittarius Full Moon, reminding us of the divine importance of the sacred quest. This is an invitation to this quest.

REWILDING

July 6 to 11, Galicia, Spain.

It hurts my heart to “market” this beautiful living poetry of an offering among the influx of wellness industry noise out there. But unfortunately if I don’t talk about it, it cannot come to life, because it is depends on the gathering of women. On the sacred circle.

Rewilding, to me, is incomparable to anything else. It is the initiation back to the heart, back to the womb, back to Earth and to our cosmic lineage. It is a living organism, co-created by each woman, nourishing in turn the collective. It begins and ends much before and after we physically gather.

It is a source of power, wisdom, and beauty for us all. A source of guidance into our purpose—to our existence, here, in this moment.

It is for those who have run into the same patterns repetitively, who have reached a wall, who know that there is something deeper awaiting on the other side. It is for the pilgrims of love, the warriors of light, the devotees of the Earth. For those who have always felt a close connection to the stars.

This invitation is for those who are ready to unlock their multidimensional power and wisdom, to move forward in life with ease, with flow, with trust.

If this is you, let’s have a (no-obligation) chat.

There are 2 spots left. More info here.

As women awaken to the medicine they hold within, as humanity remembers its divine nature, we remember we have choice. We have greater things to do here, than what we have believed so far. And we collectively can come together to retrieve and share the blessings of this existence.

With honour,

Elvire

Power. That which brings sovereignty. Power. That which anchors us into ourselves. Power. That which reminds us of who we are.

But this is power over self. Not over others. Once we reclaim the power over our own mind, body and spirit, we can re-weave the structural dynamics of being-with-others. We can re-write the foundations of how we relate to systems, and to each other. By stepping into our own power, we can change the world.

Awakening to our power means remembering we are not victims, and we do have a seat at the table. We are in charge of our emotions. We are the masters of our lives, creators of magic. And the thing about awakening our power is that it is an unlimited process.

We are multidimensional beings

We are physical creatures and energetic beings. We carry lineages across time and space within our cells. And these lineages all contain specific gifts, powers and protections. We simply must open ourselves to them, remember, and retrieve.

“I am a child of the Earth and starry heaven. Bring me to drink the cold water from the lake of memory.” - Orphic Fragment 32

We are the bearers of lineages of Earth and of primordial intelligences in our galaxy. We carry within our cells the intelligence of the history of consciousness. Our DNA is a library of records of our entire ancestral line, and epigenetics proves that it activates genes depending on our environment. Everything that we experience leaves its mark, carefully reshaping the architecture of who we are.

The body as living archive

Upon this principle, our DNA can be activated, given the right invitations and energetic resonance. This is why certain sounds, geometrical patterns, and touch can awaken memories and activate new ways of perceiving reality. Sacred sound (such as chanting or the resonance of certain instruments) has long been observed as a key that unlocks the dormant chambers within us. Geometry speaks to the body in a language much older than words: in fact, it speaks directly to the soul. This has been known across all spiritual traditions worldwide, from Hinduism to Shipibo shamanism.

Specific medicines such as psilocybin mushrooms work in this same way, opening us to new dimensions of perception that we already carry within us. In the right container, the mushrooms elevate our frequency sufficiently for us to open to these realms. In this sense, the journey inward is not a journey into the unknown, but a journey into precise remembrance—a homecoming to parts of ourselves that have always existed, patiently waiting to be revealed. Mushrooms, in this way, are powerful technology. They are an instrument working with the intelligence of our system to help us remember our power. They do not give us anything we do not already have. In the right setting, they simply illuminate what has always been ours.

Understanding the soul

One way to understand it is that the soul is the primary archive—the vast, non-local field of consciousness that has existed across many lifetimes, many dimensions, many expressions of being. The DNA, then, is the soul’s physical translation—the way in which that infinite intelligence chooses to inscribe itself into matter for this particular incarnation. The soul selects, or co-creates, the lineage it enters precisely because that lineage carries the specific codes it needs for this lifetime’s work and remembering.

Current science already understands that DNA emits and receives biophotons (actual light) and that it is incredibly sensitive to frequency, resonance, and environment. Mystics, tantric buddhists, and indigenous traditions have always known this, in their own language. When we do deep healing, ceremonial, or somatic work, we are tuning the antenna, making it more capable of receiving the full transmission of the soul.

DNA activation, in this framework, is the process by which these layers become accessible to waking consciousness. The memories were never lost, but simply held below the threshold of ordinary perception, waiting for the right conditions to surface.

The most beautiful thing is that the body becomes the meeting point, the sacred vessel where soul memory and biological memory converge. This is why embodiment practices matter so deeply. The soul cannot fully retrieve what the body is not open enough to hold. Healing the body, regulating the nervous system, clearing ancestral trauma from the cellular level, all widen the channel through which soul memory can flow into conscious awareness. This is also how we become alchemists in the cauldron of darkness that is our current world. This is how we generate more light, and inject it where it is most needed.

Activation as recognition

DNA activation is not really about switching something on from the outside, but about the soul recognising itself in matter. That moment of recognition is profound: it marks the moment of freedom from construct, freedom from programming, freedom from the illusion of limitation. Tapping into the infinite intelligence of the soul reconnects us to our unlimited potential.

Let me be clear: I’m not into the perpetual optimisation of self, that we need to fix or heal ourselves into oblivion… the whole point is actually living a good life, having healthy and nourishing relationships, being present with nature. And some of us are not where we want to be in life. Understanding the true nature of our being and opening ourselves to it can help us transcend that which we perceive as obstacles.

The message is this: you can have the life that is fulfilling to you. Yes, even within this capitalistic hellscape. You can rise up to a state of play with your environment, where you birth new possibilities by the power of your mind alone. You are a supercomputer. And if enough of us understand this principle, the world in which we currently live can look different.

This is power. It is being ungovernable, sovereign, satisfied.

This transmission isn’t speculation, but drawn from concrete, lived experience. From anchoring light into matter, frequency into embodiment.

If you are ready to uncover more of your self, your magic, and ignite your heart of fire—if you want to step fully into who you really are, join me this summer:

REWILDING: A powerful return

REWILDING is a container of pure multidimensional power, where we harness our inner medicine and sacred mushrooms to open to our light and anchor it into our bodies.

From Earth to stars, we honour our lineages, receive and embody their gifts. With sacred remembrance, we rewild ourselves as daughters of this Earth, and as children of the cosmos.

JULY 6-11
Galicia, Spain

More info here

If you are curious, or even hesitant, the best thing to do is get on a free 1:1 discovery call with me, where we can chat about your personal situation and intentions.

With love and excitement, and blessed New Moon,

Elvire

Everything in the universe is made of vibration. Everything oscillates at a certain frequency. Sound waves and light waves are different patterns of frequency, each becoming manifest as different pitches and colours. And human sensory perception is limited to a fragment of the vast range of frequencies around in our universe.

Now, this shouldn’t raise too many concerns. This is simple physics. I learned this in middle school. What we didn’t really talk about in middle school, however, is that our emotional states also correspond to different frequencies. What are emotions? They are energy, in motion. They are energetic masses occupying different levels of density, anchored within our energetic and physical bodies. This presupposes that we are also, beyond biological, also energetic beings, carrying a certain charge of electromagnetic frequency.

Back to emotions: our core material, that which we carry day-by-day and what we likely call our “personality”, therefore, carries a certain frequency. The emotions present within us, the thoughts and narratives they are attached to, all vibrate at a certain energetic pattern, that crystallises in the body over time. This was proven through different scientific experiments, from water crystals, to salt flakes, to screaming in a vessel of water and then watering a plant with it (and the plant dying).

Why is this relevant to mastering the game of life?

Because, being electromagnetic beings, we are like powerful radio-receivers. The frequency we emit is the frequency we attract: our core material sends an invisible signal to its environment of what we are open to and available for. And so the key to freedom then becomes learning to architect our core material in order to elevate the frequency of that which we attract.

Another way to perceive it is, our nervous system is wired from a young age for a certain amount of joy, comfort and peace, and it rejects what it isn’t accustomed to, even if it would be more joy, comfort and peace. Because our nervous system is more concerned with our survival than our enjoyment, if we’ve survived struggle, then struggle is safe enough and predictable enough to navigate. But joy, oh boy, we don’t know what that’s like! So we unconsciously choose known struggle over unknown happiness.

Architecting our core matierial is not always an easy process: this means doing lots of inner inquiry, shadow work, deep clearing, and reprogramming. A lot of the time, we consciously think we’ve done the work, because we consciously want beautiful things; but that doesn’t mean our unconscious material has been dealt with, and isn’t influencing us from the shadows. This is, by the way, what I’m gently trying to lead you through with Sacred Circle, and less gently so with all of my main offerings.

Elevating our frequency means liberating ourselves from the densities that magnetise more density.

Fear attracts more fear. The more we feed an emotion, or frequency within us, the more we give the signal to our environment that this is what we stand for. The more we feed uncertainty, the more life will throw reasons for us to be uncertain. This is the law of resonance.

Mastering the game of life, then, begins with the recognition that a lot is within our control. It doesn’t mean all is always well. But we learn to play with what comes to us. We choose what we want to feed inside of us. The pain, the fear, the doubt, or the gratitude, trust and love inherently present in us all? You can perhaps see what I mean by density when you feel into the different lived experiences of fear vs. gratitude within your body. One feels heavy, the other one expansive.

The challenge here is that a lot of us have lost access to the trust and love as they have been concealed by our denser emotional attachments. This is where strong inner work is vital: breath, entheogens, and different somatic modalities all reconnect us to the god within. To the unlimited potential, the blank canvas, the fertile soil ready to be planted. And from this reconnection, we first recognise who we are not, shedding false ideas of limitation, and from this point we can decide who we want to be.

And in deciding who we want to be, we engage ourselves in calling in higher frequencies into our lives: through our thoughts, actions and choices, through loving ourselves. And as our radio signal becomes higher and stronger, we suddenly find that our life flows, that things are easier, and that good things can happen to us too.

The more we nourish gratitude, the more we see that which we can be grateful for. And when challenge arises, we turn within, and look at what this challenge is asking of us. Where, inside of ourselves, are we being guided? In my maestra’s recent words, rather than why am I experiencing this, we ask, what for?

In every challenge lies a precious lesson. Every challenge allows us to surrender a part of ourselves. And in this surrender, we get to rebirth ourselves as more free and unlimited. If you haven’t caught on, I’m a die-hard advocate for radical self-responsibility. Because only when we understand how much power we do actually have in shaping our realities, we will truly liberate ourselves. No one else can do it for us, my friends.

Self-inquiry: Where am I feeding density within me? In what way do my choices limit my expansion?

List your beliefs, behaviours and choices that are keeping you small and disempowered. And then make a list of what you can change to empower yourself.

After a week of deep ceremonial work with 18 powerful women in Egypt, I will say this: there was a time when we were more connected to our soul’s perfection, where we had access to our gifts, where we were the conscious weavers of our realities. Today, we have forgotten our truth, our capabilities. We have been severed from our source of power, and have been reduced to powerless victims of life. And us believing this so deeply, is what allows abusive systems of oppression to prevail.

So my invitation is this: if you want to see change in your life and in the world, trust that somewhere within you, there is a memory of freedom. A memory you can learn to access. And different practices will take you there. Acknowledge that it is up to you to take that step.

Soul Architecture

I have updated my offering to really wind it back to the source of why I do what I do. Soul Architecture is becoming the architect of your life. It is finding the freedom to be who you want to be. It is remembering how much power you hold within.

When you step into my space, you don’t step into a modality. You step into a cauldron of transformation, where you journey back to yourself in the most intimate way. The different practices I work with, whether breath, IFS, womb, or sacred plants, simply facilitate this process.

And all of these practices have one thing in common: they get to the point, and they work. They combine body, mind and soul intelligence to heal and grow holistically. And their different technologies can be interwoven together in a personalised manner to bring to you what you most need each time.

More on working together on my website.

And for the women: don’t miss an opportunity to be part of REWILDING this July, an initiatory experience weaving together all of the above modalities for deep repatterning of mind, body and soul.

I am pausing paid monthly subscriptions for a short period of time to nurture my 1:1 and retreat offerings—I will keep sending intuitive transmissions like this one regularly, with or without recorded somatic practices, from my heart to yours.

Egypt reminded me of what the goal is, here: that we all reactivate our wings of magic, our wings of protection, our wings of power, for a micro-to-macro scale change on this planet. If your heart calls to it, but you don’t know where to start, let’s have a chat.

With a lot of love and respect,

Elvire

Embodiment is, literally, being fully present in our bodies, incarnating within our body-mind-spirit unit, that which we think, gain as insight, and speak of.

Embodiment means being the physical manifestation of our inner work. It is the final part of our alchemical process, the Red Work, which anchors spirit into matter. This is how we emancipate ourselves from our programming, and how we bring about “heaven on Earth”.

Embodiment is more than “being in your body”

Embodiment is often mistaken with “being in your body”, which is certainly a part of it. But embodiment is not just being a gymnast or dancer. A lot of gymnasts are very disembodied. Embodiment is being in terms with all parts of you. It is holding within you all aspects, light and shadow, and walking alongside them rather than exiling them.

Embodiment is when a person feels the way they speak. When there is coherence between what is said and what is done. When there is foundation for claims, when there is experience behind opinions, when there is PRESENCE behind actions. Embodiment is gained, arguably, with age and experience, but also with a deep devotion to integrity. To creating space for mistakes and learning from them with lighthearted humility.

Embodiment is not, contrarily to what Instagram might show, tantric priestesses dancing sensually. Though some of them might be very embodied!

Embodiment is the capacity to sit in stillness with the turmoil within, holding space for oneself until all of our parts feel safe enough to surrender. And I’m not even speaking of embodiment in facilitators of care. That’s a whole topic in and of itself, which I won’t get into now.

Embodiment is creating space for truth

Are there parts of you that you flee from? Are there conversations you avoid? Are you able to receive negative feedback with grace, without making the other person regret saying anything at all? Are you a safe space for yourself, and for others?

A professional dancer or tantric priestess might be furiously dancing to avoid the discomfort of stillness. Because in stillness, there might be a little voice that carries negativity, fear, self-criticism. This is not embodiment, no matter how physical it looks from the outside.

Embodiment comes from LISTENING and ALLOWING that which wants to express through us, good or bad. After all, when we really listen, we realise there is no bad—simply confused. Parts of us that we don’t want to be with carry a message that was once critical for our survival. And because the message is uncomfortable, we run away. But once we offer our presence, and create space for these energies within us, they often end up dissipating on their own.

Once we grant ourselves the gift of conscious attention, we see that our mind and body no longer have to scream. Embodiment is being the experiencer and the listener. The observed and the observer.

And in the age of AI, authentic embodiment will matter more than ever. Are you just a carbon-copy of what you see online? Or do you cultivate enough depth to allow your own medicine to flourish and shine through?

Are you just parroting buzzwords or are you actually anchoring words into meanings? And meanings into actions? Are you someone that simply performs for approval and street cred, or are you a true carrier of magic, acquired through your own journey into the underworld?

Embodiment is who you are outside of ceremony, the quality of your relationships, your responsibilities, your reactions, and your mundane, daily life.

Awakening our medicine

I saw a post recently that really spoke to me, that said something along the lines of “it’s not about which modality you practice, but about what your medicine is.” The modality is simply a channel through which your own unique medicine gets shared with the world. So my question to you all is, what is your medicine? The medicine that you can best provide to the world? Is it your kind smile? Your warm hugs? Your skill in performing spiritual surgery? No matter how big or small, we can all be carriers of some medicine for the world.

And because embodiment is a requirement for sharing our medicine, it will be quickly apparent who simply practices protocol without anchor. Or worse, someone who simply copies protocol without any initiation.

Initiation, for the record, is what brings embodiment. By putting ourselves within the flames of friction, challenge, fear, and sometimes even death—we become that which we practice. It descends into the body after residing only in the theoretical mind.

Embodiment is the prerequisite

To bring it back to my original point: embodiment leads to more trust, more truth and more medicine. Initiation brings about more embodiment. Life offers many opportunities for initiation. Whenever we feel friction, constriction, discomfort, a grand expansion is on its way (if we surrender to the process).

My hope is to live in a world where we all embody our magic, our medicine. No two humans are the same. We are all unique manifestations of infinite consciousness. And we are limiting ourselves greatly by fearing and avoiding discomfort.

I wanted to write a new post but had no idea what to write about, and as soon as I started writing these words flowed in one stream. This message has been delivered by the forces governing Taurus season, bringing our fire back down into flesh, into body, into earth. By anchoring the fire of spirit into the flesh of matter.

This is what REWILDING is about, by the way. A space for women to rediscover themselves on a deeper level. A gathering for the initiates of truth. A cauldron of transformation where the body is the altar, the offering, and the offered-to. This unique container happens only once a year, this time, July 6-11, in Galicia, Spain. View more info here.

Somatic practice this month

Grab your journal. Take a few deep breaths. Feel the contact of your weight on the surface beneath you. Invoke a part of you that you find uncomfortable, and simply be with it for a moment. Feel it as a sensation in the body. Then visualise it as its personification. It might look ugly, deformed, distorted. Allow it to detach from your body and move in front of you. And you can begin a conversation with it.

Why is it here? What does it need from you? What would help it feel better? Note (or write down) the first thing that comes to you, without analysing it. Be with it, creating a judgment-free, curiosity-driven space for it. When you feel like you’ve received what you needed from this part, thank it for working with you today, make any deals with it you need to make moving forward, and gently bring yourself back.

Guided recording:

Plant ally: NETTLE

Nettle is a beautifully medicinal plant that has the virtue of stinging you back to health. The sting is the medicine. As we’ve established, the path to embodiment is through creating space for our discomfort. Nettle also literally stings you back into the present. You have to watch your step, and walk mindfully when it is around!

To work with nettle, you can simply drink nettle infusion, which carries a huge amount of benefits for your physical and energetic bodies (very high in iron, for example). Or, if you are feeling very brave and have access to fresh nettle, allow yourself to be touched by its mighty sting, and breathe through the discomfort.

The next Substack post will be very powerful and will possibly bring about some new gifts. Until then, sending you all big love.

Elvire

I grew up in great denial of my femininity

Like many other girls, I learned to “not act like a girl”, to earn the respect of my peers. I prided myself on being “one of the boys” for my entire childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. But this distortion only kept me separate from at least half of myself, and half of my power.

What did that look like for me? I was “chill”, “down with anything”, poor boundaries, watched the game, drank beer, “avoided drama” and all other sorts of "manly” stereotypes. I upheld the idea that women are mean to each other. I didn’t trust them. And I certainly got a lot of validation from being the only girl in a boy group.

The return

The return to the feminine has been deeply personal for me. It’s been the recognition that the feminine looks the way I say it does. Sure, I went through the stage of honouring what society has determined is feminine—pink, make up, and cute outfits—but that was simply a part of my process of integration of what I had so strongly denied.

I identify as a woman, but my femininity takes many forms. Sometimes it is more typically “masculine”, sometimes not. The point is, it is free. And in permitting myself this freedom, I was able to truly expand into the full spectrum of my embodiment as a human being.

The most challenging part of this process was, however, returning to the circle of women. I had to face my fears of judgment, of exclusion, of feeling alienated, of feeling like I’m far too much or not enough. Women have been conditioned to compete with each other, which generates an understandable resistance to throwing ourselves in the middle of a women’s-only space.

But in these circles, desconstructing myself layer by layer, tending to my wounds, I found truth. I found power. I found so much beauty. I reconnected to the tenderness and awe that I carried deep within my heart, muffled by overcompensations of toughness. I let myself melt.

The medicine of the circle

For me, creating women’s spaces does not come from an eternal comfort at the sides of women. It comes from a reckoning, and the profound understanding that this is where we are supposed to be. Our discomfort comes from distortion, and we are all contributing to it every day.

When we let go of the narratives, the stories and the masks, what we find is that there is nothing more nourishing than a circle of sisters. All ages, all backgrounds, all walks of life: sharing one heart, one womb, one pair of hands and feet.

All connected to our original mother: the Earth

Women have a special connection to the Earth. She nourishes us in the same way that a woman’s body nourishes life. Returning to the Earth, to the elements, is a sacred return to the primal essence of our magic. The simplicity, the steadiness, the abundance, the unconditional love. The freedom to simply be.

Last year, I launched the first edition of one of my passion projects: Rewilding. It was an incredibly moving experience, as I realised I had placed myself right into the belly of the beast, into the circle, walking alongside a dozen incredible womxn. We worshipped the Earth, worked with her medicines, reconnected to our bodies, our breath, our wombs, our hearts. And most of all, we reconnected to real sisterhood.

A lot of women believe they need to feel like they are all about women to join this circle, and my invitation is this: the resistance is the medicine. Come heal this wound in the heart of the fire, where what you will meet is divine love herself.

Rewilding is about coming face-to-face with yourself, while being held throughout it all. It is an initiation. It is not always a walk in the park, but it will crack your heart open into who you know you are meant to be.

This is a loud invitation to all my sisters who want to get down and dirty. Who want to bathe in natural springs, eat soul-nourishing food, sit together in ceremony, and return home to their bodies. Who want to crawl out of the womb of the Earth and birth themselves anew. Rewilding is an ode to life, to divine pleasure and to beauty.

This is a stream-of-consciousness message straight from my heart, to yours. Those that hear the call from the Great Below, you know who you are.

Rewilding: 6-11 July, Galicia Spain

A six-day immersion in the mystical mountains of northern Spain, embedded in a longer journey including 1:1 preparation and integration.

If you are curious, visit this page or book a free call with me to discuss details.

DISCLAIMERS

• Though nudity is celebrated in certain areas of this retreat, this is not a retreat involving sexual practices of any kind

• You do not need a physical womb-organ to participate in this retreat. We are working with womb-energetics, which every human being is a carrier of

In the previous chapter, I mentioned longing. In our alchemical journey, we’ve been moving through the Black Work (dissolution), White Work (purification), and now moving into the Red Work, the incarnation of new reality into form, the embodiment of spirit. Matter without spirit remains mechanical and conditioned. Spirit without matter remains abstract. As spirit penetrates matter, there is integration—true alchemy.

Longing is the fire of devotion that makes the two, one. Our longing exposes where we are still separate from union, from unconditional love. Where we are separate from spirit.

What is spirit?

The living intelligence moving through form. The breath of life. The great force that animates all that is. Spirit is in every human, animal, plant in our material reality. Arguably, spirit can also animate non-natural beings, or “objects”. Spirit is also beyond what the human eye can materially see. And spirit is not somewhere “out there”: our breath is our most immediate connection to it.

Longing

Longing isn’t “I want something that I don’t have”, but a longing for something already within. It is the pulse toward a remembrance deep within our bones. Longing comes from our original wound of separation from our Mother, our life-source, as we are thrown into the world forgetting where we come from. Longing comes from the grief embedded in the human experience.

Longing is the force that moves the universe—the cosmic play of hide and seek that the divine plays within each of us. Sometimes it hides, and we are separate from it: we experience contraction, friction, we feel small and obsolete. And we seek it again until we reconnect and find it within us.

Mirabai Starr writes in her book, “grief is the philosopher’s stone that transmutes the lead of longing into the gold of union.”

How does this relate to Easter

After the crucifixion of Christ, Mary Magdalene lays at his tomb and refuses to leave. She is in total longing and devotion to him, despite him being “gone”. She is embodying the threshold point of the alchemical process between death and life. This longing creates the friction for the unseen to become seen, for the darkness to be brought to light, for matter to meet spirit.

In alchemical terms, Easter is the reanimation of the subtle body, and the union of spirit and matter.

Mary Magdalene becomes the alchemical vessel through her devotion, embodiment and direct experience with spirit, which she anchors within her.

Devotion

Trauma from religious oppression has made us culturally allergic to the concept of devotion. We hear devotion and immediately think of self-sacrifice and discipline. But devotion is the structure that sustains our longing. It has less to do with our actions, and more so with our hearts.

Devotion is our unwavering commitment to stay, even when we lose hope. It is the presence that we bring at the face of separation, the trust that we anchor into in a leap of faith. It is the knowing that we are guided to where we need to go, simply by opening our hearts to the mystery. It is the willingness to remain present in a space where transformation has not yet revealed itself.

It is showing up at the altar every day and praying without hearing anything back. It is trusting the process of life. It is the flame of the heart that doesn’t flicker and doesn’t go out.

Devotion is what allows us to go through the full alchemical process without prematurely quitting.

Somatic practice: Magdalene on the Tomb

You can do this practice every day for 21 days. You can practice embedding it in your everyday life, at any point you feel a tension, or longing.

Plant ally: Red Rose

As you already know, Rose is one of the greatest teachers of alchemical work. As we step into the Rubedo (Red Work), the red Rose symbolically binds white and black, light and dark, into flesh.

The rose also represents the union of two opposites: softeness and strength, openness and boundary. It teaches presence with what is: you cannot grab the Rose hastily. You have to be mindful, present, so as to not hurt yourself.

The Rose teaches us to accept the beauty and the pain. It opens the fire of our hearts, and anchors the light into our vessels.

How to work with the red Rose: sit with her for a few moments each day. Gaze into her spiraling petals. Allow your field to be inspired by the strength of her stem, and the softness of her petals. Feel this duality in your own body. Allow the Rose to activate the frequency of embodied strength and presence within you.

The Rose is a master teacher. I always have Roses in my space, within my field of vision. And I never stop receiving from them. My heart expands in their presence—my spine gets more upright. I embody my power more each day.

Back to Easter

When Christ resurrects, Magdalene doesn’t immediately recognise him. She initially thinks he’s a gardener. Recognition, clarity, or understanding, only come after devotion has been sustained through the threshold of not-knowing. So a lot of us might have the mindset of “I’ll believe it when I see it”; but in reality, you’ll see it only once you surrender to it. You will see it by showing up even when you don’t see it. Only then, can union happen.

Relating to the Invisible

One of my favourite songs at the moment is “Lo Invisible - Ayla Schafer”. Relating to the invisible is being in relationship with something that we cannot see, or fully understand. Our body and our presence are where the knowing lives.

Relating to the invisible is expanding our faculties as beings on this Earth. We are both matter and spirit. And we have been culturally orphaned from spirit to our absolute global detriment.

With love and devotion,

Elvire

How many times have we heard the classic “we are all one” or “it’s all love and light” lines? It’s not that they are not true, but they can quickly lead to spiritual bypassing, and are often used as a pretext to justify shitty behaviour.

The work that we want to do here is multidimensional—we’re not seeking to bypass anything, in fact, we want to bathe in discomfort until we are finally free from it. The work we do examines the duality of our being: both light and dark. This is how we attain true healing, true freedom, rather than constantly chasing the high of escapism that often hides behind the “oneness” rhetorics.

Embracing our duality allows us to find our unity within, to anchor the light into our human life. I don’t believe we are here to transcend this limited earthly experience, though it is very appealing when faced with the horrors that are part of it. I believe that we are here to incarnate the most we can, to remember all that we are and experience it through our senses, flesh, and longings.

According to many traditions, including Vedanta, we are here to remember our place in the cosmos, in the divine, in our original home, through separation—through rupture. And we do so by entering a sacred dance of connection and disconnection from it, until we remember over and over again, each time deeper than before.

This longing is the original wound: our separation from our mother, the cosmic mother, and our amnesia regarding where we come from and what we are doing here. We experience this when we are present with our darkness, when we are lost, when we are longing for meaning, connection and unconditional love. But this longing is precisely what brings us back to ourselves.

In The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts, he explains it simply: the universe works in opposites: you cannot have pleasure without pain, self without other, light without darkness. Not in a work-hard-play-hard kind of way, but that we literally wouldn’t recognise what light is if not for darkness. The only reason we understand what light is, is in comparison to darkness. It is not-darkness.

Like the inhale is always followed by the exhale, darkness is just as much a part of life as light is. They are two sides of the same coin. Trying to permanently live on an inhale, you would eventually suffocate. The same would happen if you permanently lived in light.

Darkness is precisely what motivates the movement toward light—the perpetual becoming of existence. It’s what keeps things interesting. Pure light stagnates. But the longing for it, now that is a reason to transform, to shape-shift, to inhabit a new form, a new possibility. When we already have everything, we lose the need for anything. When we are already in the perfect light, we lose the need to look anywhere else.

The inevitable process of forgetting who we are (ie, infinite), is the very thing that allows us to remember. The famous Rumi quote says, “the wound is where the light gets in” because light cannot penetrate pure light. And the process of receiving light, in the humility of darkness, is the divine remembrance of who we really are. There is no receiving without humility, without longing.

This might seem conceptual, but I’ll bring it back home in a second.

So—how do we embrace duality?

Dealing with our triggers

When we walk the conscious path, when we are co-creating with existence, we recognise that we are always presented with two choices in each given moment: creation, and destruction.

Triggers are parts of us that we have denied. They are parts of us that hold on to unprocessed energy from the “shadow” of our being. They hold beliefs that we were given early on in life, and that are usually too painful to face. So we created overcompensations, or protective mechanisms, to protect ourselves from these uncomfortable parts.

For example, someone who was made to feel invisible as a child may grow into an adult who constantly seeks validation and recognition. Someone who felt controlled may become extremely independent, rejecting help or intimacy. Someone who was criticised for their emotions may learn to suppress them entirely, appearing calm on the surface while being turmoiled underneath. These are brilliant strategies that our system put in place to protect us from a—once very real—danger.

But when they remain unconscious, when they remain in the shadow, they begin to control our lives. As we’ve seen in previous chapters, dealing with our shadow is the key to holding more parts of ourselves. The more space we create for the parts of us that we’ve rejected, the more we allow for light to enter our being.

Dealing with our triggers means accepting the darkness within us, recognising it as such, and transforming the charge that it carries—either by releasing it, or by alchemising it into an energy that is actually more aligned to our current reality.

For instance, anger is often rejected as something negative. Yet anger can be the force that restores our boundaries. When we learn to listen to it instead of suppressing it, it can guide us toward self-respect. Jealousy is another emotion we tend to judge harshly. But jealousy often reveals a desire that we have not allowed ourselves to claim. It shows us what we secretly long for, what part of our life we wish to expand into. Even shame, one of the densest emotions we carry, often guards the places where we felt rejected for simply being ourselves.

The process of alchemising a part of us that carries dense, negative energy into release is a process of remembering who we really are. We are not our beliefs. We are not the parts of us that keep us small. We are what is behind them. We are infinite. And we are perfect.

And perfection does not mean purity, or no room for growth. It means we are whole, complete. When we address our triggers, we are allowing ourselves to experience more wholeness, more completeness.

And this process of remembering our wholeness, our infinite power, is bound to repeat. We remember, we forget. We attach to our wounds again. And we have more opportunities to meet ourselves, more deeply each time.

Each cycle reveals another layer of our being

And there is wisdom in our darkness: it slows us down, forces us to go inward, and rattles us out of who we are not. It is the womb of gestation, the space of deep recalibration. But for this to be the case, it means we take responsibility for our destiny.

When we allow ourselves to walk consciously through this darkness, the light that emerges from it becomes stable, a primordial part of our structure. We no longer depend on external validation to fill the void of that which we reject. We are in full embodiment of ourselves.

This is anchoring the divine into our human experience: meeting ourselves with presence, with curiosity, with love. The sacred dance between light and dark is what allows us to fully meet ourselves, to inhabit our being, and to come back home.

Guided practice

Journaling prompt

What are the parts of me that I reject, that I am uncomfortable with, or ashamed of? What role do they have in my system? Describe bodily sensations, imagery, and any insights and memories. Don’t analyse, don’t judge what comes out.

Guided somatic practice - DIVINE UNION WITHIN

As a daily practice, you can do the final part of this longer ritual practice:

• Visualise the red rose in your womb: the rose of energetic matter, of flesh, of Shakti: this is your force

• Visualise the white rose inside your crown: the rose of thought, structure, inspiration, Shiva: this is your clarity

• And finally, visualise the pink rose in your heart: the unity of the two, your wholeness and your inspired action manifest, the unity of the divine anchored into matter

Breathe with these three roses for a few moments every day, finding the union of light and dark, embodiment and idea, divine and matter, within you, stepping into the role of the co-creator of your life.

Plant Ally: Mugwort

A powerful ally for shadow work and illuminating the hidden. Mugwort is a beautiful plant that I connected with a few years ago and again more recently. It enhances dreams, it is a deeply liminal spirit. It reminds us that insight emerges from the darkness itself.

You can work with Mugwort by making tea before bed. Do so for 21 days, and record any dreams that you had in the morning.

Roses: softness and strength, in one

Roses, as always, are welcome in your practice. This month I’ve really connected with pink roses. They brought me much needed reconnection to my heart. I always have them around, no matter which other plant I work with. Roses are medicine for the spirit, for the heart, for the womb. They remind us that in our beauty, in our softness, we must remain strong and protected. Roses have thorns. Roses are strong and powerful. And they allow themselves to blossom all the same.

With love,

Elvire

I was on birth control for 11 years. I had completely suppressed my cycle, and at the time, this felt like a blessing. But what I called freedom was deep dissociation from the most primal intelligence in my system.

As soon as I got off the pill, I gained back control over my life. When I got my bleed, things that weren’t meant for me started shedding, as I entered a powerful recalibration process. Structures that were put into place until then crumbled. Where things were being kept afloat, there could be no more hiding. My relationship ended, my health underwent a huge review.

And slowly, things stabilised, and I became accustomed to the change of hormones every month. I started reconnecting to the cyclical wisdom of my body. Some menstruations were easy, some were horrifically painful. And over time, I noticed something.

Menstruation is equivalent to psychedelic work

Psychedelic means soul-revealing. The psychedelic process usually involves bringing unconscious material up through our awareness, so that we may come to terms with it, observe it, witness it, hold space for it, and then—if it no longer serves us—lovingly release it. Unfortunately, in order to let something go from our system, it almost always passes through our awareness, through the more conscious layers of our psyche.

The exact same is true throughout our menstrual cycle: after ovulation, we begin the descent. What we call “PMS” is nothing other than our awareness becoming more subtle and refined, and our unconscious material becoming conscious: our fears, our shame, our grief… This material lives within us, and governs us from the shadows.

Our luteal phase is an opportunity to come to terms with ourselves, with the places where we can love ourselves more. And the psychedelic experience has taught me to hold space for this challenging process.

As things arise, I now recognise what is at play: the natural movement of energy from the darkness to the light. And I can simply welcome it, honour it, and decide how to engage with it. And most beautifully of all, I can bask in the psychedelic-level clarity I receive once my bleed releases all of these things from my system.

Our menstrual cycle doesn’t get enough credit: it is a monthly report card, a powerful energetic purge, and our greatest teacher and ally. It is the compass through which we can guide our every day life, and understand how our body, mind and spirit are doing. Once we attune ourselves to it, it allows us to work in greater harmony with ourselves, with our soul’s essence.

Understanding our bleeds as an energetic release allows us also to honour every part of it: the discomfort (and even the pain) can be transmuted through breath, through deep inner inquiry, through serious spiritual nourishment and self-love.

The key is surrender

As with psychedelics, pain arises through resistance. In fact, pain is resistance. If we resist the process, we experience tension. Surrendering means melting into the discomfort, and cultivating a process of deep listening to the emotions, thoughts and sensations that are speaking through our body.

And of course, not all women and menstruating folks are able to take the time and space to disappear and exclusively nurture themselves during their bleeds. Most are forced to go to work, perform as usual, and suppress this divinely powerful process within them. And that’s just one among many different ways in which we are systemically disconnected from our power.

Rather than being taught to honour and love this moment of our cycle, we are taught to fear it. We associate guilt, shame and horror to it. And imagine what kind of tension that creates within the body. Imagine if this sacred process was revered.

Freedom is in our hands (and wombs)

As we slowly awaken to the medicine of our cycles, we slowly regain autonomy over our psyches. We know what our bodies need: we don’t let “PMS” tear us down—we stand in power, gently nurturing ourselves, holding ourselves accountable, and fall deeper into compassion.

Being a woman, having a cycle, is a psychedelic experience. Becoming the captain of the ship, navigating the waves, the pulsations, the spirals of this cycle, is becoming the master of one’s life. It is freedom through surrendering, power through listening. It is the deep, embodied knowing that sometimes there is pressure, sometimes there is ease. It is feminine, cyclical wisdom.

For this Full Moon

Yoni Steam Ritual (link), even if you don’t have a Yoni

• Suggested blend: Sage, Rosemary, Lavender, Rose, Calendula

Remember, not suitable if you:

• are pregnant or think you might be

• are actively bleeding

• have an active infection (yeast, BV, UTI, STI)

• have open cuts, sores, or recent procedures

• have an IUD

• are extremely sensitive to heat

Journal prompt: reflect on your relationship with your menstrual cycle. In what ways are you willing to honour it more ? (suggestions: blocking out the first day of my bleed to take care of myself, being more mindful of my nutrition before my menstruation, start expressing my boundaries…)

A simple meditation prompt: visualise a rose in the center of your womb, and allow it to expand and flourish, nourishing your womb with crystalline healing energy.

If you haven’t yet done the beautiful womb-clearing guided somatic practice, you can find it here, along with a more simple daily womb-connection practice.

Wishing you a powerful full moon. May it reveal what is hidden, may it bring our unconscious material to light. May it free us of illusion. May we surrender to its medicine and magic.

AHAVA

Photo by Clara Grace May

But if we go even deeper into receiving, into the position of being the receiver, we often hit a barrier of resistance. Why? Because ultimately, we don’t fully control what we receive. And that can feel scary.

Giving is easy: you are perfectly in control of what you give. We often see those who are comfortable oversharing their traumatic life events, under the guise of “being an open book” (this used to be me). But actually, as we do this, we are very selectively deciding what comes out of our mouth, the timing and the narrative. This isn’t vulnerability.

When we receive, however, we don’t control what we receive, how or the conditions in which it comes, and this can feel destabilising. Closing ourselves off to receiving then becomes a protective strategy to make sure we don’t receive anything hurtful. Unfortunately, in doing so we also close ourselves to receiving all the beauty and the love of this life.

Surrendering to Receive

Receiving requires surrender. Surrender requires trust. And trust is often misunderstood.

It is impossible to trust every single human, or even one human completely. Humans are volatile, they ebb and flow, they move with cycles. It is only natural that we change, grow and evolve. Therefore trusting that someone will forever remain the way they are today is highly wishful thinking.

Trusting life by trusting ourselves.

Trusting that no matter what happens to us or around us, we are securely anchored within ourselves, and we will weather the storm. Sure, it might be uncomfortable, we might cry, but we’ll be okay no matter what.

This level of trust is what allows us to open, to surrender, and to receive the infinite blessings of life. Because if we spend our lives with our hearts closed in case others try to break them, we end up missing out on our temporary existence on this Earth.

Trust means, “no matter what, I’ll be okay”. But when we’ve carried the opposite message within our bones for our entire life, it is hard to decondition.

Usually, trust is built in infancy. The presence and attention of our caregivers directly impacts our ability to trust life. And because it forms so early on, it precedes verbal memory and cognition.

For us to become trustful, we need to alchemise the information inside our primitive body. And what helped me go from profound mistrust to radical trust was my work with the breath, plant medicine, and somatic therapy. That’s my personal path, but many paths lead back to the heart. What is certain, is you need to go through the negative charge held inside the body, and allow your body to experience a new possibility that will become the new information carried by your cells.

Trust is built through consistency

A sure way to build trust within your system is to consistently show up, check in and be intentionally present. Doing your practices every day, connecting to your inner world. You are sending the signal that it is safe to be here, retrieving your energy back from the fears frozen in the past, even with one drop of presence at a time.

Because when the system understands that today we are no longer helpless infants dependent on unpredictable caregivers, but adults that can take care of themselves, it can lean more into trust. Trust becomes internal.

And at some point, the system surrenders.

Surrendering: dropping the armour

Surrendering, contrarily to what we might think, does not mean defeat. It is dropping the armour of the illusion of safety. It is dropping the false protection of separation and allowing ourselves to merge entirely with the divine (with Truth, with Love).

The divine has many faces, and some of them are frightening. The divine sometimes is the Devouring Mother, ruthlessly ripping us appart until we completely let go of our need for control. But the end goal is always the same: the remembrance of the love that we primordially are (Know Thyself, remember?).

Sometimes, we get too caught up in our minds, and forget to live from our hearts. Trust is the shift from the mind to the heart. The mind only tries to protect us, it is build for our survival. It is always looking for threats and problems to solve. But our hearts carry the interconnectedness of all, they attune us to the sacred matrix of creation. And when we tune into the heart, we understand that we are being guided to remember.

When we understand that everything that happens in our lives is an opportunity to connect to ourselves more deeply, and that everything can be alchemised into becoming a gift (lessons turning to blessings), we also naturally drop the fear that is keeping us from opening in curiosity and trust. We open our hearts to all the gifts of life.

A guided practice to open ourselves to receiving the gifts of life

This is a simple but powerful practice you can do daily, to strengthen your container and your energetic field.

Until next time

Keep working with Rosemary until the end of this lunar cycle, to clear your mind and focus your practice. For new beginnings.

Wishing you all a beautiful end of February.

AHAVA

Today is the beginning of a new cycle. Some of us have already felt the shift within us. A dear astrologer friend of mine said it is as if we are being reborn—but not in the whimsical way, rather, in the, “where the fuck am I and who are these people around me” way. Saturn and Neptune entering Aries (and launching the Fire Horse cycle) is the spark that initiates a long arc of transformation in the collective, both structurally and spiritually. Without getting too deep into the astrology (because I’m not an astrologer), what I’ll say is, this is the start of a new era.

What systems are working for us, and what systems need to dissolve?

So, along with this powerful new moon in Aquarius and solar eclipse, we really are on the apex of a giant shift. And our work here together seeks to harness this potent cosmic energy to propel ourselves into a new “timeline”. By timeline, I mean, a new energy line, a new frequency, that will carry us into a new version of our reality.

In order to receive, we must recalibrate.

To receive anything—from a new job offer, to a home, to a loving partnership, to any blessings we can imagine—we must align ourselves to the frequency of that which we want to attract. Receiving is not a passive act, but the product of diligent work: that which we’ve been doing together over the past few months—alignment, purification, alignment, purification, recalibration.

In other words, preparing our vessels to hold more light. Like antennas, we must calibrate to the right frequency to receive its corresponding gifts. Calibration happens through (you guessed it) consistent inner work, and facing our shadow.

Because if you want to attract a loving partner, but you haven’t looked at your incapacity to be vulnerable, then you aren’t creating space for your being to hold that partnership. Even if you attract the perfect partner, you won’t have the capacity to hold them, because your system will eventually reject or transform them.

In order to receive more light, we must face the shadow.

Pause—what do I mean by “receive more light”? By that I mean the blessings and expansion that come after a period of trials and tribulations, of the dark night of the soul, of the underworld journey. When we are initiated into holding more parts of ourselves in our trajectory to wholeness.

In alchemical work, which I explained in the previous chapter, receiving the light corresponds to the White Work phase: it is the clarity, the understanding, the discernment, the direction, the love. The more we learn to hold our darkness, the more we can hold and expand our light.

And facing our shadow means coming to terms with all the ways in which we separate ourselves from wholeness. Facing our unsavoury parts—our coping mechanisms, our triggers, our neuroses. It is confronting, but ultimately, so rewarding.

Back to my point: receiving the light is not a passive act. It takes commitment, work, devotion, in order for it to be well integrated, incarnated into our being.

And each part of the alchemical process has different practices, all working for the goal of receiving more light and anchoring it into matter.

White Work is about clarifying, refining, purifying. It is about the distillation process, the removal of illusion, the creation of clean boundaries, following the total dissolution of the Black Work.

If our vessels aren’t ready, meaning, strong and purified, receiving light can create imbalance and chaos. Because primal energy expands what is in its way, if we haven’t dealt with ourselves, what will expand is our unconscious fears, our blockages, our karma, and we will fall further out of alignment with love and truth.

Luckily, we have spent the past few months clearing, cleansing, and making space to prepare our vessels for the light to flow in and expand. The somatic practice here will be powerful, and will seek to generate inner fire to activate our system to open itself to the light.

This is a way in which we activate our bodies to meet the light of the cosmos, to be co-creating with existence in birthing our new realities.

FIRE HORSE, FIRE HEART

This practice is a one-time practice to open the new lunar year with the energy of the Fire Horse (strength, courage, boldness). It’s a very strong, deep practice, so make sure you have time, an empty schedule, and nourishment after (food, tea).

During this practice, we use the Fire Breath. If you are not familiar with it, please listen to the instructions, below:

Fire Breath instructions

Fire Horse, Fire Heart practice

Note: Along with our beautiful new Lunar Year, today was also Mardi Gras in France—so children were out in the streets playing all day. There was not a moment in the day of perfect silence, and I still wanted to deliver this meditation today. You may hear the sounds of children in the background of the recording, more so in the beginning. Another version of the practice will also be uploaded by tomorrow.

Plant ally: Rosemary

Rosemary is one of my favourite plants. I’m a child of the Mediterranean sea, so maybe it hits something of home. But Rosemary is a powerful teacher.

Rosemary clears the path for new beginnings. It brings mental clarity, and helps with protection and boundaries. It clears the fog and strengthens will.

How to work with Rosemary (28 days):

• Make an infusion (steep 10-15 mins), drink in the morning or evening.

• Steam bath: clears mental fog and psychic residue (pour boiling water over Rosemary in a bowl, cover your head with a towel and breathe deeply for 5-10 mins).

• Smoke cleansing: clear your space, cut cords, clear confusion (burn a sprig or bundle of dried Rosemary, just like you would Sage).

• Yoni Steam: if you have a yoni and you have read the chapter on this subject, include it in your steam to clear emotional and energetic residue.

  Suggested blend: Rosemary, Calendula, Chamomile, Lavender, Rose

As always, take precautions if you are pregnant, or have very high blood pressure or an excess of heat (Pitta) in your system, as Rosemary is a highly warming and drying herb.

An important note:

The stronger our light, the larger the attraction of the darkness. As we grow our energetic bodies, we become like lamps attracting moths in the darkness. Protection remains a subject. We must stay in a sacred dance between openness and guardedness.

In the next chapter, we will discuss embracing duality: light & dark.

Until then, I wish you all the blessings for this incredible, historical new cycle we are entering together. It is such a joy to work alongside you—we are much stronger together.

Amor & mucho cuidado,

Elvire

Boundaries are important, as stated previously, because they differentiate here from there, me from not-me. This is still very important, beyond the “we are all one” rhetorics we are often exposed to. We are incarnated beings, meant to experience life-within-flesh and separation.

Boundaries are what allow us to focus on the “me” and build what and who we are.

Boundaries are the scaffolding allowing for the building of the temple. Or the walls of the temple itself, within which the sacred will be awakened, sustained and amplified.

Without proper boundaries, the energy has nowhere to build itself in. Think of the importance of a cup, in the act of drinking water: pouring water into thin air doesn’t allow it to be harnessed and utilised. As soon as it arrives it is already gone. A good cup allows you to gather and make good use of the life-giving liquid you intend to drink.

Strong containment allows for your life-force—the accumulated product of your repetitive inner work, skill, spiritual practice, and devotion—to accumulate, and to be available and harnessable.

My teacher Josh Schrei, who a part of this chapter is inspired by, described it in the following way (or at least this is what I got from it, it’s been a while): in order for anything to mature, to develop flavour, nuance, wisdom, or depth, it needs the heat of friction, but also a good, solid cauldron that will allow it to cook. Think of the most delicious stew: you don’t throw in your ingredients and take them out of the pot five minutes later. The best stews need heat over time.

The same applies to our human psyches: depth comes from the repetition of friction over time. It comes from containing our energy and allowing it to mature, before spilling or sharing it. Containing information allows it to develop nuance.

What does containment look like in real life?

It looks like being a student without immediately becoming a teacher. It looks like time alone in reflection, in processing. It looks like repetitive sadhana, or practice, in the privacy of pure loving devotion. It looks like keeping some things to yourself.

It is a struggle, even for me, to refrain from sharing everything we go through, in an age where sharing information is made so easy and fun. I love sharing everything I have under my sleeve. But I also recognise that this is not always doing myself or anyone else a service.

Letting things mature, allowing for things to cook, is also a revolutionary act against the quantity-over-quality life we are exposed to. It is actively contributing to the human ecosystem with quality, real value, and integrity—in a time where these attributes are very hard to find.

The structure of boundary—of how much of myself do I share in each moment—creates the container that allows us to receive and deepen within ourselves and our respective gifts.

We are essentially allowing for a vertical, focused, accumulation of power, rather than a horizontal one. A fine dining experience rather than a tourist-trap restaurant with hundreds of frozen items on the menu.

This is about being unshakeable, unwavering within ourselves. This is true power.

In practice

1. Observe the ways in which your container is hermetic and where it leaks. Where are you leaking energy, and how could you be containing and protecting it?

Journal your reflections.

2. Guided somatic practice (also available on the drive, link in the chat):

In the next new moon, which opens us to a new cycle, we will open the topic of RECEIVING. But it is impossible to receive without a solid container. This is why this is important. Because what do we do with what we receive, once we receive it? How do we honour it? By being a worthy vessel for it. By putting in the reps and practice hours to create a beautiful temple for it. Then, the divine descends and remains on its throne.

Think of it as gestation: an embryo needs a warm and safe environment to grow into a fetus and eventually into an infant. Like everything good in life, time, space and nourishment are fundamentals to growth and development.

So do you want to be someone with thousands of under-developed ideas, or someone who becomes a master of their craft through focused practice?

With love (and lots of containment),

Elvire

For the correct unfolding of the Great alchemical Work, it is important to not get stuck or give up at any stage until the embodiment of the full process. Each step is primordial to the next, carefully laying the foundation for real (and durable) transformation.

Therefore, when we have spent some time shedding, releasing, and melting into the Void, it is important to remember that this is not the end point.

For a lot of us, the Void starts feeling like a safe place: the Void is the Mother, the todo y nada, the great dissolution where we no longer exist. But we are here to embody our physical and energetic forms: and we are the architects of what that form gets to be.

If you need to spend more time on any of these phases, please listen to your body and do so. Listen—and be of service—to what is being asked of you, from you, at all times.

For this new lunar cycle, I invite you to the next step of the process: establishing boundary. Boundaries delimit here from there, me from you, truth from distortion. Boundaries birth you into a certain reality. Boundaries create energetic protection because not everything needs to be accepted and included.

Know Thyself

The strongest energetic protection you can achieve is to know who you are. As I was writing this chapter, this phrase struck me like lightning. In alchemy, this is represented by the Philosopher’s Stone: the precious self-knowledge of who you really are. Hint: you are not your thoughts, not your identities, not your efforts, but what is hidden (in plain sight) behind these constructs. This is ‘achieved’—or rather, remembered—through the very alchemical work that we are doing together: shedding, clearing, illuminating the shadow and anchoring into presence and truth.

When you know who you are, when you understand yourself to be a timeless creative power, or the Great Mother Void herself, you can embody trust, alignment, truth and love.

When you Know Thyself, you are setting an unspoken boundary with existence: this is what I stand for. You are stepping into the role of Creatrix—of recognising your own power in co-creating with existence. You can fully inhabit the temporary, material form you live through.

You can choose who you become, who you are around, and what you spend your time, money and energy on.

A guided practice to remember who you really are:

A quick disclaimer on this chapter:

Boundaries is not an excuse for cutting people out as soon as they challenge you or make you feel discomfort. This is about not being a victim of your own life and your own choices. Not a buzzword to use as soon as someone asks for your help, or asks you to become accountable for your actions, or to generally be less shitty.

Boundaries are important on all levels: physical, energetic & spiritual. Physical boundaries are pretty straightforward—this is the behaviour I’m willing to tolerate in my immediate environment, in this capacity, etc. Energetic and spiritual boundaries are no different, intricately connected to physical boundaries, and just as important.

Boundaries as Love

There are so many practices from different traditions around the world that practice spiritual guardianship and protection. I will briefly touch on some of these practices—but what I want to offer in this container is guardianship not based on fear but on love.

It is easy (in modern spiritual spaces, but also deep in Amazonian jungle) to hold a perpetual discourse of fear of spiritual attack. This can be in the form of “this person drained my energy” or “I got hexed” or “this person is low-frequency”. In the jungle, there is more talk of sorcery and life-threatening attacks that can happen often from healer to healer, often due to jealousy and such. I won’t get into that now.

What this creates is a climate of fear, and manically waving sage around our space after someone cried on our shoulder or expressed some frustration. It’s not to say that spiritual attack isn’t real—it is. But it’s to reframe it in how we can actually protect ourselves from it in a way that empowers us rather than victimises us.

First of all, what do I mean by spiritual attack:

Across different traditions, this shows up as intrusive thoughts, emotional overwhelm, breakdowns, self-doubt, generational shame, fear, confusion, loss of centre, loss of vitality and energetic drain. Sometimes it can be deeper fragmentation of the psyche, and collapse of your understanding of reality.

Psychological frameworks will describe this as the activation of unconscious material. Animist traditions might speak of “curses” and “negative spirits”. They are closely related, and I will explain why:

What we imagine, when we hear the word “curse” today, is a sorcerer on top of a cauldron mixing a strand of our hair with some rat poison and laughing maliciously. But a curse is simply a belief that is charged with intention and unconscious participation: a belief that is unconsciously (or blindly) and actively believed and embodied over time or generations.

For example: someone holds resentment or anger about a situation or person (emotional charge), and charges different stories (intention) with that energy. If these stories land upon a recipient who carries a wound of fear, or who doesn’t use conscious discernment to neutralise that story (unconscious participation), then they “accept” the curse.

We also perpetuate curses upon ourselves everyday by the words that we use: our unconscious beliefs such as “I’m so stupid”, “I’m so ugly”, “my memory is bad”, even as a joke, nurture curses that are often generational.

Generational curses, then, are the beliefs that we have inherited unconsciously through our parents and ancestors, which keep us limited, small and fearful. A spiritual attack therefore only works through misidentification with that “curse”.

Back to the point—what is in your control:

Awareness, aka: Know Thyself

Only your unconscious parts, illusions of identity, or repressed wounds (which you have not integrated and accepted) are vulnerable to “attack”. When you know yourself as awareness, presence and eternal witness, rather than your actual thoughts and emotions, then you become free from being “possessed” and destabilised by your thoughts and emotions. You can handle energetic intensity, because you can hold multiple aspects of who you are. You are not getting thrown by the waves, because you understand you are the entire ocean, my friend.

Once you become clear on who you are, you need to rely much less on “protection rituals”. A curse requires unconscious consent. Self-knowledge withdraws consent automatically.

Boundaries as self-love: feeding the good herbs

One of my teachers, Brittany Wilson from the Original Instructions school, has transmitted to me one of the most important teachings on this topic: you can go to a healer and get “cleansed”, or you can sage yourself into oblivion, and this might remove some of your burdens from your system. But what happens as soon as you are exposed to them again? The vacant space they left from is ready to welcome them with open arms.

She calls this the “grandmother” style of gardening: similarly to tending to a garden, the best form of protection is not to pull out the bad weeds, but to nourish all the beautiful, strong, protective plants, until there is no space left for the bad weeds to grow.

To connect this to the human psyche, rather than being paranoid about “cleansing”, it is much more protective to daily and actively feed the beautiful, strong, radiant and protective parts of you: you remind yourself through affirmations and acts of self-love, who you truly are, who you choose to be—until there is no space for the parts that siphon your precious energy. And with time, and sustained practice, you notice that you are the steward of a garden full of beautiful flowers and pure magic.

Remember, you are the one who chooses what you give your energy to, what you are feeding.

How to feed the good herbs?

Love yourself in every way, even if at first it feels fake or performative—your subconscious won’t know the difference

• Nurturing yourself, being gentle with yourself, forgiving yourself, embracing all parts of yourself through action

Paying attention to your inner dialogue: are you cursing yourself?

• Our words cast spells on our psyche. Our words become the fabric of our reality. Pay attention to the words that you speak: are they carrying the vibration of fear, or of trust? Whatever it is, is what you will abracadabra into your life.

• Pay attention to the music you listen to: unfortunately music directly imprints on our subconscious and forms a lot of our thoughts and beliefs.

• Our words highlight our programming—and our programming is what keeps us stuck in loops. Changing the way that you speak, eventually changing the way that you think, is how you hack your habitual patterns of operating; your autopilot mode.

• Whenever you notice, redirect to an affirmation

Affirmations: the most direct antidote to density

• Whenever you catch yourself cursing yourself, e.g. “of course this happened to me”, “this day couldn’t get worse”, “I am stupid”, “bad things always happen to me”. Take a pause, take a breath, and redirect:

• “I am doing my best”, “I am perfect as I am”, “I am doing enough”

• And start noticing and naming when positive things happen to you, no matter how small: even when someone unexpectedly pays for your coffee, “good things always happen to me”, “I am the luckiest person alive”, “the universe always conspires in my favour”

• This has single-handedly changed my life, because all my negative habitual thoughts have been replaced by beautiful affirmations that I’ve put into place over time. And I don’t care if I’m delusional, I am at peace and I am free!

Energetic Hygiene

The best practice of energetic hygiene is what I’ve written about until now.

However, it is good to have habits of clearing and cleansing, just like you want to keep your home clean. (Also, cleaning your home is energetic hygiene and a deeply sacred practice). Your body is your temple, it is important to treat it as such. Again, this is profound self-love.

The most beautiful way to clear dense energies is using the elements:

WATER - Bathing consciously twice a day—one of my favourite practices of spiritual hygiene. Allowing the water to clear your field. While in the shower, stating out-loud:

“I release all energies that are not of the pure essence of my soul and return them to their rightful place. I call back all parts of myself, across all timelines, dimensions, spaces and people, now integrated and whole.”

FIRE - Sitting with the fire, and allowing it to transmute all densities in your field that do not belong to you. Offer whatever you wish to let go of to the sacred fire.

EARTH - Grounding, if that’s available to you: barefoot on the Earth, allowing everything that’s not yours to be absorbed and transmuted by the Mother. She always knows what to do with it.

Burning herbs such as green sage, rosemary, mugwort, to clear the space of densities: but remember, waving around some sage isn’t as powerful as your own intention and heart-connection to your truth, while waving around some sage. Understand that you have the capacity to annihilate all density with your light, and the support of plants.

AIR - Using your breath to move density from within your body. Breathe consciously, releasing with your exhale.

Using your breath to chant mantras and prayers:

OM NAMAH SHIVAYA - a powerful clearing mantra that reconnects you to your essence and your light.

An Aramaic mantra I chant every morning and evening to recalibrate to the frequencies of pure light and protection:

Alaha Rachme (Womb of Compassion) OR Inana Noohra (Light of Heaven)

Wormwood (Artemisia Absinthium): teaching boundaries & reconnection to your power

A strong, bitter plant. Parasite cleansing (energetic, emotional and physical). Deeply detoxifying. Teaches boundaries on all dimensions. Reminds you of your power. Particularly potent for women to reconnect to their sacral force. And, clarifies the truth so you may Know Thyself.

To be used with caution & for a limited amount of time, and not during pregnancy (it is an abortive plant).

Make yourself an infusion every morning or evening for 14 days. Journal your thoughts and insights as you go. Make sure to listen to your body: if it feels like too much, lower dosage or stop. If you wish to work more gently, you can keep working with the Rose.

Plant bath: deepen your connection to your plant

Plant baths are one of the strongest ways deepest to connect to a plant.

Every Tuesday and Friday of this lunar cycle.

Boil Wormwood in 1L of water for at least 10 minutes, and let her sit until the water is less hot (so you can pour it over yourself). Once it is ready, take a conscious shower, and after your shower, take your pot and ask your plant to help you clear yourself of illusion, of falsehood, of confusion, and to restore your inner power and boundaries. Pour her over yourself. Give gratitude. Air-dry.

Preferably to at night, so you can pay attention to your dreams.

Roses also teach boundaries, as they are beautiful but have great thorns. You can always keep them around for extra support. Artemisia teaches a deeply cleansing type of boundary, of returning to the source of your power.

(Self-)Love is the answer

We are much more powerful than we think—but freedom is an acquired taste. Like the Artemisia, it can taste quite bitter at first. But it is the key to living a healthy, fulfilling and spiritually sound life.

The more we trust in our power, the less enforcing we need to be with boundaries: the boundary simply becomes our naturally embodied state of being. Because when are fully present, and at peace with all parts of us, nothing can feed off of our rejected parts or our inner turmoil.

This is the goal: to get to a point of inner acceptance and radical self-love—this is the real medicine that dissipates all darkness. From this state, our outer world reflects it back to us. From an inner world of fear, this is what we will unfortunately have to deal with externally, as well. The choice is yours!

1. Understand you have the power to change your thoughts, and therefore your reality

2. Apply conscious action to reprogram yourself: affirmations, prayer, ritual cleansing, feeding the light

3. Trust that nothing can get to you without your (conscious or unconscious) consent

4. And—a loving “fuck off” to those that don’t treat you with respect. Because enough of that in 2026.

You are the creator, you are the architect. You are the master weaver, weaving alongside existence. What will you birth into this new cycle?

Deep care to you all,

Elvire

Photo: plant bath with different native medicinal plants harvested alongside a river in the Sacred Valley of Peru.

EXTRA RESOURCES:

“Guardians & Protectors” episode from The Emerald Podcast

My Medicine Music playlist if you are ready to step out of sad-girl Indie music for a moment:

In a previous post I explained this through the lens of the Spiral of the Rosa Mystica:

• Black Work / Oeuvre au Noir : Putrefaction, Death, Dissolution - the descent into the underworld - the death of false structures and illusions

• White Work / Oeuvre au Blanc : Purification, Clarification - discernment, digestion of trauma - subtle awakening of energies - listening

• Red Work / Oeuvre au Rouge : Conjunction, Incarnation, Fixation - divine union, the marriage of opposites - fixation of volatile structure - creative fire - coagulation, embodiment

The Magnum Opus is the completion and integration of all three Works. It is neither the dissolving, nor the clarity received after, but the capacity to remain present through life’s intensity without fragmentation. It is about depth, coherence, integrity. About embodying duality, where your psyche no longer splits against itself, and your body becomes strong enough of a vessel to contain your spirit.

The Magnum Opus reminds us that discomfort is often part of the process of growth. Befriending this process keeps us anchored in the ebbs and flows of life.

We have experienced the Great Work since the creation of Sacred Circle—as we merged with the cyclical energetics of the cosmos, we, too, dissolved, like the trees shed their leaves in preparation for winter.

We did shadow work, examined our belief structures, and released them in the alchemical fire. We introduced womb work, and the importance of womb clearing. We surrendered to the Void. We have done different practices each month, to progressively and somatically restructure our vessel so that it may hold more parts of our being.

We are now slowly entering the phase of the White Work. Once you’ve gotten rid of the noise and the cloudy vision, you can hear more subtly, and see more clearly. You can begin to truly listen.

The lunar power of the White Rose

The Spiral brings us back to the Rose: the White Rose, specifically, that bridges spirit and matter.

The White Rose teaches the capacity to stay present within liminal states. It illuminates our psyche in a deeply lunar way, reflecting what has always been present within us: beauty, truth, devotion. The White Rose reminds us gently of the purity within, of the light emerging from the darkness.

We also learn to honour the subtle—far from chasing peak experiences, we are surgically refining our spirit. We are receptive to what is, and to what needs to be.

For this week’s practice, I invite you to purchase five white roses, place them on your altar or designed practice space, and sit with them every morning or evening. Allow them to clarify your heart; to teach you presence without overcompensation. Sit with them long enough to become the White Rose herself. Journal your process if you feel inspired.

I remind you also that each practice I share should ideally be done every day for 21 days. You can keep practicing the Void meditation. You can absolutely keep doing the Yoni steams and womb clearing practice, especially around the Full Moon, which was yesterday.

These practices are valuable because they are repeated. If you are feeling frustration or the need to receive a new practice each week, the invitation of the White Rose is precisely this: slow down, integrate. Fortify yourself through the subtle layers of repetitive work. This is what truly changes you. This is what turns you into a master of yourself.

Note to paid subscribers: remember you can find the drive folder with all recordings in the group chat. I will soon open a Q&A for discussion.

Welcome back from the depths—take a deep breath.

With love,

Elvire

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The dead of winter is not a moment for endless grinding. It is a time for quiet listening, for brewing, and for recalibrating. It is a moment for realigning, not yet in action but with mind.

What is being asked of you? What did this last cycle remove from your life?

Last week we worked with welcoming the Void, with reconciling our relationship to the cosmic womb of creation. And in this gestational space—once we are nice and cosy—we can begin to call upon our new realities, so that they may come find us. As if we were giving new code to a computer, so that it can implement new, upgraded software.

This is a gentle, slow process. It happens quietly. It is the part of the process where architectural plans are starting to be made, rather than the building itself.

A few notes on this practice: it is a continuation of last week’s Void practice.

• It is a continuation of last week’s Void practice, so it is important you play first the Void practice and then this one (I will place the two together below, as well as in the drive).

• I invite you to have one or multiple roses to work with. If you are not able to find roses, you can call upon the quantum rose in your mind’s eye.

• In the practice I use rose and myrrh anointing oil. If you would like to make one yourself, the process is described in detail below. You can also use olive oil and simply bless it with your intention for this practice.

• Note that this is a live meditation from a workshop, in terms of the recording itself—but we are blessed to have my dear friend Thomas Dunford play the Arch Lute to accompany the practice. He is extremely gifted and it is an honour to have him play on one of these tracks.

Rose & Myrrh oil

• Find an empty dropper glass bottle.

• Hold it in your hands, with the intention that the oil sanctifies, protects and empowers whatever it touches. Blow that intention into the empty bottle.

• Then, add 20 drops of Rose essential (or absolute) oil, and 20 drops of Myrrh oil.

• Fill the bottle with a neutral oil such as jojoba or sweet almond.

• Blow into it again to seal your intention.

  Use it in the morning, in the evening, to remind you of the holiness of your vessel. To make your body sacred whenever you forget. Anoint your hands, your feet, your heart, your womb, your third eye, your crown—whatever feels right for you. Remember, you have the power to make the ugly beautiful, to make the fallen rise, to turn anything holy.

Quantum Rose practice

1. Write down in your journal. What is the darkness that you are honouring and leaving behind this cycle? And what is the light that you are welcoming? What does the Light look like to you? What version of you is carrying this light? Describe in detail. Optional: you may safely burn this paper, allowing the fire to transmute the darkness, and carry the light into the Universe so that it may be manifested.

2. Have your oil and your roses within reach.

3. Finish the Void practice, then start breathing in a circular way (merging inhale-exhale-inhale), in and out from the heart-space. And visualise a Rose inside of your heart. Breathe circularly (but gently) throughout the entire practice.

Start with the Void practice from last week:

Take a few moments to start breathing circularly in and out from the heart, visualising a rose inside your heart-space, and start this practice:

Om Namah Shivaya - to welcome the Divine immortal light

Our minds have unlimited power—unfortunately, we haven’t learnt how to harness it. Mind shapes reality, and this practice allows us to use the manifesting power of our mind to impregnate our reality with new information and new possibilities.

This practice is meant to bring you closer to yourself, in a space of deep tenderness and love. It was a gift to receive and to channel and filled me with a lot of emotion and hope. I have witnessed a lot of darkness in this cycle, and the promise for a brighter tomorrow became palpable as we all gathered and practiced together.

This is why this Substack is such a privilege for me, also—doing this work together makes it so much more potent and meaningful.

Love in service, Ahava,

Elvire