Let me tell you a bit about it.

In case you don’t know, when you are invited to speak at a conference, unless you have a big following or name, you have to not only pay for your flight, accommodation and all expenses, you also have to pay for the conference.

This was news to me.

This obviously means that conferences such as these attract a certain demographic. People who can take days off work and pay for all their expenses so they can share their work. Which I see as part of the problem, but more on this in future pieces.

When I was invited to speak at ICON it felt like an important milestone because my work is still quite fringe, and being able to translate what I have been working on into “conference language” was a good challenge I wanted to take on.

I may have shared this here before, but for the purpose of this piece, it is important that I share it again. The format of the conference and costs involved make it almost impossible for women like me, women who haven’t “made it in modernity’s terms”, to come and play. Which means that a big part of a “certain flavour of reality” is not present in such spaces.

My work is, in many ways, a response to that.

The way I got there, was already relational, as I was only able to attend the conference because I had support from so many people. Women and men who value my work, literally took me there. They helped me with the expenses, they offered me places to stay, etc.

These friends and allies have been vital in my journey because these people are attuned to work that is not shiny. My work is more like mycelium and fungal decomposition than a flash flood or earthquake.

In fact, much of women’s vital work happens largely out of sight.

As many of us now know, more due to Netflix docos than time spent in nature, fungi slowly break down dead material and return nutrients to ecosystems. It is the unglamorous yet persistent work of decomposition and renewal.

So I have been doing below-soil work for a long, long time. Probably as many of you have. In the past six years I have had this impulse to begin moving my work above the soil. But the journey from invisibility to visibility is an interesting one. Especially if you stay committed to NOT diluting the message, nor the transmission.

It’s been a windy road, to say the least. I have made many friends and gathered allies. Some of my allies are the ones who have gotten me invited to places such as ICON, for example.

But how, oh how, to make the female mind visible in a context that is so structurally, yet invisibly, male?

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If you follow my work you must know by now that I have no problems with men. I love men. I also love women. What fascinates me, continuously, is how we have created structures that seem to apply to “humans” (therefore implicitly working for both men and women and any variation of gender identity) but they end up not working very well for either.

A conference space is such a case. I won’t go into many details here because every time I try to make distinctions between male and female minds without a lot of care, it backfires. It couldn’t be otherwise. We are modern people after all.

Let me ask you this.

Have you ever stopped to think about how Modernity rests on a largely “sex-neutral” metaphysics?

What this means is that beneath many of our institutions and assumptions sits the idea that, underneath the obvious differences of our bodies, humans are fundamentally more alike than different.

We know that sex matters, but we still believe it is mostly at the level of biology, something that would NOT deeply shape how we see and interact with the world.

The mind, the self, the subject who thinks, works, creates and makes meaning is assumed to be essentially universal. Male and female bodies may differ, but we have rarely stopped to ask whether inhabiting those different bodies might also give rise to different ways of experiencing, perceiving and knowing the world.

So… with that “invisible assumption” now in mind, let us go back to a conference space. The entire way in which many conferences are designed and organised evokes almost NO brilliance from the female mind. In fact, it hinders it.

So when I agreed to present at ICON, I wanted to keep true to what I see and yet, if I simply criticised the format of conferences I’d not be adding much. I could simply be seen as an “unprepared speaker”.

The main stage was reserved for people who were more well-known in the space and spoke of topics of more “general interest”. My talk, and that of many others, happened in smaller rooms.

I tried to prepare for the talk. I was told I should. I wouldn’t want to “wing it” in front of such an intelligent audience. But what happened was that, if I was being really present to what my work tries to make visible, I could only know what I wanted to speak about once the relationship was visible to me.

Once I flew from Australia to the US, the seasons changed. I went, overnight, from early winter (at that time) to early summer. The earth in both countries was in a very different phase of its aliveness. The plants were different. Our insects and reptiles were asleep whereas in Boulder gardens were beaming with life.

This matters.

Creating a talk from the opposite side of the world freezes the relationship with what was happening in front of me. If I had been stuck on “what I wanted to share” I would have missed the look of the people who were actually there.

To me, the talk was a success because it felt like a reciprocal opening. I cried and so did the audience. There weren’t many. Twenty people at most. But there was a conversation happening. A transmission. They were receptive to me and I, as a representative of the “hidden aspects of the female mind”, could open up. Just like in sex, or birth, such aspects of the female capacities don’t just “open up”. They need to be invited in.

When I received the video of the conference and I watched the presentation it was like drinking processed orange juice. There is some goodness there, but the body doesn’t absorb it as well. Sugar without fiber becomes even unhealthy.

The “content” is there, the tears are there, but you see no reciprocity. You don’t see that my tears were met by other people’s tears. You don’t see that my passion gets ignited by the silent stories of men and women sitting across from me.

At the end of my “talk” (it was more an energetic exchange, if I am honest) we went straight into a break and for twenty minutes an informal circle of women formed and stories, tears and laughter were shared. This is also not in the recording.

I share the recording here because modernity has become so nutrient-poor that even processed juice may offer something. If that’s the case, I’d love to know.

When I watched, apart from the natural cringe that people have when they watch themselves presenting, I simply noticed how impoverished that talk was without the whole relational component.

Online, my talk went from, what I heard others saying, “one of the most powerful talks they saw at the conference,” to a watered-down, PowerPoint-less, casual talk.

(I promise there were more than six people, the angle of the camera didn’t help my case - processed orange juice indeed ;-))

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This is also why I decided to share the book’s chapters with readers who want to join the journey. (check out details here). Female capacities that modernity hasn’t valued need a container to be received well. If they don’t have one, we simply assume they are “lacking something”.

In the interview I did for Parallax I share a bit about how it felt to participate in the conference.

So here you can see both. Me whilst “in it” and then me talking about it. 🙂

I would like to end this piece by saying that it was an honour to participate in the conference. It was fun, meaning-full and connecting.

It was, however, very important for me to interact with the entire experience as a woman engaging with “men’s work” (and I know that not all men prefer such spaces either, yada, yada, yada, but hopefully you get my point ;-)) because seeing it this way gave me much more freedom to interact with that structure. I could be playful with it.

I took my shoes off before I spoke and I danced with the format, in the best way I could.

I wanted to present while making visible how the constraints of that particular format were interacting with me as a woman who had recently crossed the threshold of menopause.

I didn’t want to “look professional” and give “the perfect presentation”.

I wanted to reveal something.

I hope my book does the same. If it does, I’m happy.

Dear friends,

It’s been a while.

I’ve just returned from a last-minute trip to Brazil, where I spent 11 days immersed in the beauty and complexity of family ties, deep connections and old friendships.

By now, I’ve spent exactly half my life outside Brazil. During the past 25 years, I moved a lot and, along the way, have both created and lost friendships and, with them, parts of myself.

Some on purpose. Some, simply as a byproduct of my then transient life.

Over eight years ago, I moved to a community in the Australian countryside. Here I have found roots. Real roots. Tree roots. I was able to ground myself in ways the modern world rarely makes possible.

I moved here, coincidentally (or was it?), at the very beginning of my perimenopause journey and, looking back, it was the river swims, the intimacy with the morning dew, and the re-cognising of the rhythm of the seasons made visible in the blossoming of flowers, in the hiding of the bees, in the sound or silence of birds that grounded me.

Intimacy became a way of being. Felt and known. Not as a concept or aspiration but as lived experience.

This intimacy, obviously, also included what some may see as the “unpleasant” sides of life. A description that now makes little sense to me.

Hailstorms, strong winds, unending rain and river floods that rot the roots of trees if we are not care-full, or don’t know how to tend.

Here, I learned how to tend to many of my relations.

My modern ways have served me very little on the land, and my life here has unwound my body so I could begin to feel. To attune. To re-member.

This was vital and yet, I now see, it was also incomplete.

I needed to return to my human roots.

A year ago I lost my cousin to a voracious and insatiable brain tumour that swept her out of this Earth in less than two weeks. At that time, the family web was ruptured by loss, grief and confusion. How could this happen so quickly? She was young, the mother of two daughters. How could this be?

Intimacy doesn’t choose, remember? To feel beauty is to also feel the depths of pain.

I accompanied her journey as closely as I could, being 12 hours ahead, in Australia. News would catch up with me each morning, drip-feeding the evolution of her diagnosis. What began as a headache and confusion became, quite quickly, devastating news. To me, sleeping in those days meant waking up to difficult news, as if the entire world could shift as I slept.

Fernanda wasn’t my closest cousin. Vera, her older sister, was also mine, as we grew up playing and fighting together. Nanda, as we called her, was the younger sister. The one we, the older ones, mostly refused to play with in our naive young arrogance.

But there was love between us all. So much love.

As we grew, connections would happen in family gatherings, and conversations would go as deep as the time a shared meal would allow. Our kids met each other and played together. A weaving of Australian and Brazilian kids, connected by a web that had been woven decades earlier.

When Nanda died, I couldn’t go to Brazil. I missed her funeral and the wake. I didn’t hug my aunt, my uncle and cousins in person. We didn’t cry together. Or rather, I didn’t cry with them.

My grief felt unnatural. Ungrounded. Disembedded from place and people. For six months, I’d cry when listening to Brazilian music and experience the depth of sadness when cooking a simple rice and beans dish.

My husband and kids didn’t share my grief. They were sad for Fernanda, her kids and family, yes, and they were also sad for me, but they were not grieving.

I was grieving alone. Held by trees and more-than-human kin but a node outside the web nonetheless.

It was then that I realised what I had read hundreds of times. Grieving is a collective process. Grief is metabolised with and by the collective.

My grief was unmetabolised. It left me hollow and longing.

My uncle, Fernanda’s father, had been diagnosed with cancer years before her passing. He had treated himself, had celebrated years of remission, only to be told a few years ago his cancer had come back and had now spread.

About a month ago, he went to the hospital and from there never returned. One year and four days after the passing of his daughter, he also left his body.

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Hearing the news of his decline and improvements from afar reminded me of my journey with Fernanda’s short hospital stay. I began exchanging messages with my cousin Vera asking for news.

My heart was once again aching. I felt, once again, alone.

I had recently come back from two international trips. The last one being the week prior. I was just getting “back” into my routine. My commitments, finances and family context were all telling me that going to Brazil would be crazy.

I spent two nights in turmoil and confusion, trying to solve with my head something that belongs to the heart.

In a moment of impulse, an unchecked moment of vulnerability and courage, I called out for help.

I’ll just take a moment here to remind us of what courage actually means. Courage comes into English through Old French corage, from the Latin cor, meaning “heart.”

The mind, obviously, still tried its hardest to intervene. But it was too late.

The response came immediately, which meant I had no time to convince myself otherwise. I got support with the flight, with my local commitments, and my partner and kids were amazing and made it easy to leave.

Once I bought my ticket, my uncle died. In my heart I was hoping to see him alive.

Once again, my head began questioning. Should I still go? The tickets had now been purchased. They were non-refundable. The decision had been made.

A twenty-five-hour journey, despite being soul-destroying, has its benefits. This is how long it took to scramble my rational mind and drop me into a state of simply “being with” life which, frankly, is how I live most of the time and believe to be the natural state of women (when she is not in overdrive).

Occasionally my head, heart and body still toggle. This was one of these times.

Until I surrendered.

What followed were eleven days in Brazil that felt like a big long dream. Half of my time spent at my aunt’s house and the other half with my parents.

I had a taste of what it feels like to be a doctor booking patients back-to-back. My days were filled, from morning till night, with social commitments. Most with family, some with old friends.

In my aunt’s house, I was present for the swarm of friends and family members who would come to share stories, laugh, cry, and listen.

It didn’t feel intense. It felt right.

My aunt and I shared stories till the early hours of the morning and, through her tales, I gained much insight into my cousin and uncle. Things that my years away had prevented me to see.

On some level I had eleven days of “not caring about my health”. I was jet-lagged, spent no time in nature, ate all my favourite childhood sweets and went straight back to having three coffees a day. All the things that would send me spinning in Australia.

But I wasn’t spinning. Or maybe I was, and spinning is what I should be. I didn’t control or reason my way into that experience.

On my way back home, my heart felt full in ways that made me realise what it had been missing. I had spent many days nurturing others and being nurtured in a reciprocity of relations as old as my time on this planet. I felt like, once again, a node on a vast web, not as a node on my own.

Being with my aunt and cousins in their grief, in all the colours of their loss, gave my grief a place to rest. It didn’t diminish anything. It simply grounded the experience in the collective body.

I was drinking bone broth for the soul.

Back in Australia, I immediately felt the reconnection with the land, and especially with the river that flows right in front of my house. That river that, no matter what life throws, is always flowing.

I feel the deep connection with my children and partner and the life we have built. A life that foregrounds aspects of myself that in my Brazilian context could never have blossomed.

I became, yet again, humbled by the complexity of this life and the particular challenges we moderns face.

Many years ago I left my country and my people following a longing for something I’d only fully meet many years later. It was my impulse to leave that allowed me to create a life that honours many of the values I hadn’t been taught.

The life I have built sits on a pile of mulch.

More than twenty years and multiple rites of passage it took me to be able to inhabit relatively comfortably a life I had not been initiated into. Not as a child, nor as a teenager or young mother, and not as a post-menopausal woman.

It is not Brazil I had to push away. It was modernity dressed in Brazilian clothes and the context I had learned to abide by and even desire.

I had to have courage before I even understood that that’s what it took.

There is that word again.

Courage.

Lineage is healthy. The web is necessary. But I had to rupture and disconnect.

There was never animosity. There was simply distance. Physical distance that allowed me emotional and psychic space to figure things out. To disembed. To look at my web and decide what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to leave behind.

This return to Brazil, to my origins, to my people, was meaning-full beyond what I had imagined. Having spent the past two and a half years writing a book, there was much I consciously mulled over. So my mind and heart were primed for this layer of my re-membering. I needed to put that part of me back together. To reassemble my place in the lineage, to once again feel myself as a part of the web.

And I did.

There was love, beauty, togetherness and shared stories. So much shared life.

I don’t need to push that away anymore. I know my place in this node of relations. I know where I stand and what I’d like to keep and preserve and what is already in the compost heap.

I needed to leave home, the continent and even my mother tongue, which is NOT the one you are reading in, to re-wire myself entirely.

Now, I re-enter the web made anew and, as it seems to be the case with webs, I fit right in.

An Invitation Part 2

At the end of September I’ll be releasing my writing, the pages that make up my book, to paid subscribers. If you would like to be part of this 9-month gestation period, consider becoming a paid subscriber and let us co-create a wisdom library together.

The spell of modernity has lodged in each of us in different ways, and it won’t be by pointing our fingers at others, by shaming or ridiculing, that we’ll break the spell. It is with compassion and deep integrity that we’ll do it.

We’ll be building a pilot container to test what is required for us to individually and collectively break the spell in our lives and our relations.

This will all make more sense once the journey starts and we dive deep into the complexity of the spell.

Till then, I’ll be sharing here some aspects of the journey, and if you are a free subscriber, you will carry on getting snapshots of our journey.

Thanks for being here.

See you soon.

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Recently, I found myself in a conundrum.

As I came close to finishing the second draft of my book, a book that spends a lot of time making a case for the power of the collective, I found myself alone.

Alone as a writer. Alone as someone who has to “publish a book”.

There is nothing wrong with being an author or even publishing a book. It’s part of the deal if you want your thinking to be understood with care and context. Nothing wrong with that.

My issue is that modern people are biased towards individuality. We praise individuals for their uniqueness; we create street names, build monuments that remind us of their titles, but forget what they were working towards. The message is sidelined, often forgotten or projected upon. We put people on pedestals and forget that they are contextual. That their work came from a web of relationships and that without those relationships the work itself becomes a shell of what it was meant to be.

This brings me to the invitation I have for you.

For the past two and a half years, I have been dedicating a lot of my time to writing a book that will, hopefully, help modern women, men, and gender diverse folks understand how sex pretty much in-forms human subjectivity in much deeper ways than we give it credit for.

The book helps us name, see and untangle a spell that has been governing the stories we have been told for generations and now pass on.

The tricky thing is that the spell lands on bodies and cultures differently, making it very difficult to see and undo.

This is where becoming a spell-breaker comes in.

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The journey I am inviting you into is to join me and others in breaking the spell together. I have tried to break it on my own, and I can tell you it doesn’t work.

We are collective creatures, raised by stories that require us to divorce ourselves from our bodies and the rhythm of life itself to simply exist. Most of us don’t notice it.

This quote by Erich Fromm says it well:

The book “The Matriarch and the Machine: A Spell-Breaking Journey for Modern Women and the World,” focuses on women, but it also reveals that, being collective creatures, if a spell has been “cast” on women, it would obviously affect men as well. It could not be otherwise.

The point of the journey is to re-frame the female experience. To understand the crazy assumptions we have been living under, as women, and what we have been passing on to future generations.

It is a journey that will require us to be both gentle and fierce with ourselves. A journey that will invite us into forming relationships with people who can help us re-frame and re-member long-lost capacities that modernity has atrophied. Especially in women.

This is a pilot journey. It is a journey of trust and collective vulnerability. It is also a journey that will birth this book into the world.

You, who decide to embark on it, will become (if you wish) part of the pool of wisdom, the collective library of stories, that will help future spell-breakers.

When the book, the bones, is published, your stories, the flesh, will give it life. They will be shared either in book form or in a living library. Something to be decided.

The Matriarch is a collective, and she is asleep. The spell is strong, and it has seeped into our lives.

If you feel like being part of this first wave of spell-breakers, become a paid subscriber.

I’ll explain the journey in the coming weeks, but be sure you can be as involved as you would like. Part of spell-breaking is honouring time and timing. So honour yours.

Funds from both monthly subscribers and founding members will pay for the design, editing, and publishing of the book at the end of this journey.

Your name, your story, your pain and re-membering are a vital part of this journey, and I know I wouldn’t do this book justice if I didn’t reach out to you.

By reaching out to you, I am also practising spell-breaking.

If I am honest, it is hard and scary. But I feel like I have no choice. I am trying to walk my talk and break the pattern of “doing it on my own”. I am saying, I can’t do it without you.

If you would like to know more about what I am inviting you into. This is what I am thinking:

• Monthly release of chapters of the book (you will be part of the first readers)

• Audio or video sharing what I was grappling with as I wrote that part

• Thought provocations and suggestions of explorations that you can bring into your daily life

• One monthly collective call ( part of creating a culture in which the spell is NOT the foundation)

• Opportunity for you to give feedback, share comments, tell or write your story

There will also be an opportunity to go deeper into the material if you wish, and to journey with a small cohort of three other members. More on this later.

Who is this for?

Basically, anyone who would like to have a different lens to look at themselves and others from. Anyone who is interested in understanding “the other”. It is especially beneficial for parents of girls and young women, for women going through life transitions (pregnancy, birth, early parenting, perimenopause, menopause) and their partners.

Who may this NOT be for?

People who have very strong views and judgements on the opposite sex and who are not open to looking at them with more care and generosity.

The journey will begin at the end of September.

Join me!

They were all powerful pieces. Especially the first, by Elayne Kalila, which revealed to me the horrors of the porn website motherless.com, a site I knew nothing about until then.

I won’t repeat what Elayne’s piece is about. She did a tremendous job conveying both the facts and the emotional impact of discovering them. If you want the backstory, read her beautifully written piece, and then the second one she wrote. (here and here)

After reading all three articles (this was in the space of a few days), I went to the original CNN investigation she references and read it myself. I also looked into the reporters and the broader project they’ve been working on, called As Equals.

Wow. What a powerful rabbit hole.

The CNN “As Equals” series is a long-running, award-winning journalism initiative (that I also knew nothing about) focused on exposing systemic gender inequality—not as isolated issues, but as patterns embedded in culture, economics, technology, and power.

I didn’t read all the other articles, but there are many.

My attention turned again to the article revealing the horrors of the Motherless website. Now that the investigation has created public attention, I found myself sitting with a simple but uncomfortable question:

Why is this site still online?
Who provides its infrastructure?
What has actually been done since the investigation?

To be honest, when I typed the website’s name, I assumed I wouldn’t find it. There’s a part of me that wants to believe that when something this dark is revealed, it would be instantly shut down.

But this is my naive side. Things don’t work this way.

As I sit with this a bit longer, some uncomfortable truths surface.

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Why did I imagine the site would have been closed? And even if it had been closed, would that mean the behaviours we see on the site would disappear?

The answer is no.

The site is profitable, and most importantly, it still attracts millions of users.

This site, which evokes some of the darkest aspects of the human psyche, incest themes, coercion, humiliation, violence, with tags like “crying,” “strangled,” “passed out”, is still desirable.

So the question becomes:

Why?

I could answer this in a binary way, but I believe we need to attempt something more nuanced, something that might feel confronting because it doesn’t allow us to neatly sort people into “villains” and “victims.”

Much of my work has focused on moving beyond the “drama triangle” of victim, perpetrator, rescuer, because I find it limiting.

Also, because I can.

I live in a community with heart-centred humans. I run women’s work where I feel seen and validated in my “female ways,” and my partner goes weekly to a men’s group where he is also seen and supported in his male experience.

I am surrounded by men who are, daily, attempting to mature their relationship with their impulses, desires, frustrations, and the raw energy that has also scared them. They are doing all of this while working long hours and coming home to support their families, despite, like most of us, having also been culturally orphaned.

These are the men who surround and inspire me.

And it is because of that that I can do my work, to go beyond the drama triangle and reimagine collaboration between males and females in a new way.

But when I read pieces like these, it stops me in my tracks.

I feel myself needing to recalibrate.

I feel a responsibility to step back into that messy space where we still live as a culture. Not the idealised versions of men and women who can see and respect one another, but the reality that is still knocking.

Funnily enough, sitting with the discomfort evoked by these articles, I notice myself returning to the lens I most often use:

Rhythm.

Some of you may not know this, but a large part of my work has been dedicated to understanding humans through the lens of hormonal rhythms. This feels important because, as a culture, we still try to pick what we like about the “other” and disown what we don’t, and we do this mostly unconsciously.

This is not working.

Let us talk about male and female rhythms.

The female rhythm, during her fertile years, is oscillatory. She moves like the tides. She opens and closes, like clear skies and stormy nights. This shapes her perception, her libido, her sense of what is desirable, or repulsive.

When she reaches post-menopause, that oscillation settles. Her vantage point shifts. She can see more clearly what she was once immersed in.

In the West, we have largely ostracised the “coming down” phase of the female cycle, and I am writing an entire book about it.

But if I speak about what has been misunderstood and vilified in women, I need to do the same for men.

Because whether we like it or not, we co-create this world through relationship.

So if women have been misunderstood, it is unlikely that men have not been.

In the context of these articles, and especially encountering the Motherless website, this feels extremely uncomfortable, but necessary.

Let us look at the male rhythm.

The male rhythm follows a circadian pattern. Testosterone peaks in the morning and drops at night. It is powerful. It moves energy. A lot of energy. Have you ever spent time with teenage boys?

Just as aspects of the female cycle have been pathologised, so has male intensity.

Schools don’t know how to hold it. Neither do most parents. So we control it, stifle it, shame it, and hope it goes away.

But it doesn’t.

Because it takes immense presence to be with boys who. Don’t. Stop. Ever.

In my book, I speak about rites of passage as cultural processes that mark the death of one phase and the birth of another.

These rites create a “reciprocal opening,” where the individual matures as the community demands more maturity, and recognises it when it appears.

But in modern culture, these rites are largely absent.

In modernity, we see both.

Some boys suppress and become “good boys.” Others let the energy spiral.

Either way, many men carry their adolescent selves into adulthood.

Hormonal and neurological changes do not automatically produce maturity. They build pressure and, with it, the potential for transformation.

But without elders, that pressure often explodes.

Motherless is one of the places where this uninitiated energy has gone.

We also see this in social media where young men shape boys, often reinforcing immature behaviours. Girls, in their own way, mirror this through the over-exploitation of their fertile beauty.

In both cases, uninitiated young people are guiding others.

This is not accidental. It is a consequence of the Machine.

At the same time, testosterone surges and, with it, impulses that, without boundaries or structure, have nowhere to go.

Without grounded models, boys learn from what they see: media, porn, culture.

To many men, a woman becomes what he sees online: a flattened version of herself. Always available. Always sexual. Always consistent.

This is the man who will enter relationships, marriage, fatherhood, without ever having been initiated into what that actually requires.

Most women have a cyclical relationship with desire. After marriage and children, this often changes dramatically.

It is not uncommon for a woman to go through long periods of low or no libido, especially postpartum, during breastfeeding, or after birth-related trauma (which, in modernity, is not rare).

In this context, misunderstanding deepens.

This lack of embodied understanding of cycles, of “ups and downs”, is what I call Cycle Dysphoria.

It is within a cycle-dysphoric culture, devoid of elders and rites of passage, that these misunderstandings turn sour.

Cycle dysphoria in boys can show up as expecting, and demanding, consistency where there is none.

Porn doesn’t help. Women who fake orgasm also reinforce this misunderstanding.

And so, a feedback loop forms.

When I look at something like Motherless, I don’t only see individuals behaving (very!) badly, though that is also true.

I see something else.

I see what happens when powerful human energies, especially sexual intensity, have nowhere to go.

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This is where swedish philosopher Alexander Bard offers a useful frame.

Bard speaks of three modes of human experience. In a simplified way, Logos could be thought of as rational thinking, Mythos, as meaning, and narrative, and Pathos, as emotion and intensity.

To Bard, males are split between Logos and Pathos and women live mostly in Mythos.

A healthy culture, ideally, integrates all three.

But modern culture privileges Logos. Pathos is mistrusted or suppressed. Mythos is fragmented.

When Pathos is not held, it does not disappear.

It distorts.

Like a kinked hose suddenly released, energy sprays out chaotically.

And so we see outrage cycles, addictive content, extreme behaviours.

Motherless is not an anomaly, it is what happens when Pathos goes haywire.

We see this also in war without purpose and in destructive extraction of land and people.

All expressions of uncontained intensity.

So for me, the question is not how to eliminate Pathos. But how do we hold it?

If we continue to have an immature relationship with sexual energy, we won’t be able to address issues like this meaningfully.

Sports, rituals, art, and initiation, especially for boys, are not luxuries. They are containers.

When I look at a site like this, I feel the pull to blame.

Blame is simple. It offers quick relief. It gets me off the hook.

But what feels more honest is to sit with what I saw. This is what happens when a culture does not know how to work with Pathos on any scale.

We can begin by asking ourselves: How do I hold my own Pathos? Do I instantly numb it or push it away? Do I act it out?

Energy doesn’t just disappear and even if the website disappeared tomorrow, Pathos would remain.

When I return to the beginning of this piece, to the shock I felt about what is being consumed, shared and normalised, I no longer see only depravity.

I see orphaned Pathos, seeking somewhere to go. Intensity without guidance. Desire without form. Power without relationship.

And I see what is missing.

Lineage.

Pathos is not abstract, and its “healing” will not come through ideas alone. It happens in the body, in relationship, in community.

It happens when we pause before acting on impulse. When we learn to move energy through the body. When men allow themselves to feel the grief of wanting intimacy and not receiving it.

His rhythm is not wrong.

But drugging a wife is wrong. Cheating is wrong.

Choosing to speak, to feel, to listen deeply may bring him closer to what he is actually seeking.

So perhaps the question is not only how we shut down a website.

But how we grow a culture of men that no longer needs it.

A culture where intensity is not orphaned.

Where boys are not left alone with their power.

Where Pathos has a place and where those who can hold it, shape it, and meet it without fear are no longer missing from the world.

Sixteen years ago, while trying to conceive my first daughter, I found myself in two very different worlds.

On one side, I was immersed in the work of Ken Wilber and developmental models, maps, frameworks, and ways of understanding how humans grow and evolve.

On the other hand, I was stepping into a much more intimate inquiry: what it actually means to be a woman. Not just a human, but a female body, shaped by rhythms, cycles, and hormonal tides.

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The only problem was that these two worlds didn’t speak to each other.

The developmental spaces I was in had nothing to say about the lived reality of the female body. And the women’s spaces I entered, while rich in embodied wisdom, rarely connected that wisdom to broader developmental frameworks.

So I walked both paths. In parallel. For years.

Until something in me began to weave them together.

Through menopause, a rite of passage still largely unrecognised in our culture, this integration deepened. What emerged was a way of seeing development that includes the body, its’ rhythms, and the very real differences in how we are shaped.

This year, I’ve been invited to speak at the Integral Conference 2026 in Denver, where the theme is “Exploring the Role of Integral in a Post-Tragic Future.”

What I’ll be sharing there feels like a harvest of the last sixteen years:
An exploration of what becomes possible when developmental models meet the intelligence of bodies and what remains incomplete when they don’t.

I feel both excited and humbled by the opportunity.

I’ll be alongside thinkers and practitioners from many fields, people who, in different ways, are devoted to imagining and enacting what a post-tragic world might look like.

In a time when so many are responding from fear, urgency, and fragmentation, what becomes possible when we gather from a place of care?

If you are able to attend (in person or online), I’d love to connect.

And if you’re not, but there’s something you feel should be voiced into that space, if you have questions, tensions or insights, send them my way. I’d love to carry a thread of you into that room.

If you can, please spread the word. You can check out the other speakers here, and here to know more about ICON’s vision.

With love,
Adriana

Every day, my inbox fills with Substack essays, Medium articles, news briefings, and conference invitations. The tone is similar across platforms: the world is undergoing a massive shift, and it is not comfortable.

Some interpret the current crisis as a global initiation, a necessary rupture that could move us into a new era where awareness, relational intelligence, and love finally take their rightful place at the table.

Others are less hopeful. They see decline, fragmentation, and irreversible damage.

I appreciate the initiation frame. But working intimately with initiatory processes has taught me something: an initiation does not happen automatically just because circumstances become intense.

An initiation only completes if it is metabolised. Individually and culturally.

If we move through it consciously, something reorganises. Awareness deepens. Identity shifts. Relational capacity expands.

But if we resist, numb, freeze, or rush to restore “normal,” the same sequence of events becomes “unnecessary” suffering. We endure the heat without undergoing transformation. The only goal becomes returning to what was familiar.

Both outcomes are possible.

You may not yet see the connection between the work I do and what is happening globally. I cannot rush that link into visibility. Rushing is part of what created the rupture in the first place.

So let me lay a few threads.

Modern culture does not understand initiation. We move from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from adulthood to old age, brushing past thresholds without recognising what they are designed to awaken.

For women, this is particularly consequential. Our initiations are biologically embedded. Menarche, menstrual cycle, pregnancy, perimenopause, and menopause are still culturally neglected. These thresholds are treated as inconveniences to manage rather than passages to embody.

When initiation is bypassed, capacity remains latent. The initiate does not fully emerge.

In traditional societies, the matriarch was not simply an older woman. She was an initiated presence, a regulatory force in the tribe, a mediator of power. If a woman is not initiated, she cannot hold that role. She can’t guide because she, herself, is untethered.

If that link feels even slightly plausible, then we must also accept that repairing it will not be immediate.

Deep repair takes time.

Sometimes antibiotics are necessary. But they are not the same as restoring microbial balance. Prevention and regeneration work differently. We are living in a moment where acute interventions may be required in some contexts, yet without preventive cultural intelligence, they will not resolve the underlying imbalance.

We are living in times where the old and the new are blending like river water meeting the ocean in a mangrove. It does feel like we are collectively standing in a mangrove, doesn’t it? Sometimes more river, sometimes more ocean, always in transition.

Within this terrain, continuing to manipulate women’s hormonal landscapes without deeper cultural inquiry will not produce generations of initiated elders. Hormonal technologies may relieve symptoms or serve real needs, but without restoring initiation and rhythm literacy, they cannot generate Matriarchs who can look power in the eye and speak to it with authority.

And unmediated power, like lightning, devastates. We can all feel that.

The matriarch mediates.

Of course, most of us can think of a few women who wield and guide incredible power. But we need more. We need the capital “M”, Matriarch, the collective.

She needs to remember what is worth protecting. And for that to happen, we need to remind her of what she has forgotten.

This is why we must dive into the root of things, all the way down into the spell that destabilised this regulating aspect of our collective intelligence.

It all did not begin at menopause. It began much earlier.

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Cycle Dysphoria. Laying the ground.

In the book I am writing, or perhaps more honestly, the book that is rewriting me, I give a name to the spell that has been causing havock in modernity:

Cycle Dysphoria.

Naming is not solving, we know that. But naming alters perception.

Cycle Dysphoria combines two simple terms. A cycle is a repeating sequence of phases. Dysphoria is a state of unease without an obvious cause.

Together, the phrase points to a discomfort, often diffuse and difficult to articulate, regarding cyclical movement itself. More specifically, discomfort with the descent phase of cycles: contraction, inward turning, release.

As the first essays have already explored (here, here and here), we live inside systems that privilege ascent: growth, expansion, output, visibility. The upward arc of the cycle is celebrated. The downward arc is obscured, pathologised, or erased.

But remove the descent, and you no longer have a cycle. You have an abstraction. This is very important.

Every living system on this planet breathes in and breathes out. Expands and contracts. Grows and decomposes. When a culture renders contraction invisible, it does not eliminate it. It simply loses the capacity to interpret it.

That interpretive loss is what I am calling Cycle Dysphoria.

Take a moment and look at your life, at your relationships, your attunement to cycles, and especially to the descent phase. What do you notice?

For women, Cycle Dysphoria can make us feel crazy or at odds with everything because our biology makes cyclical fluctuation undeniable. From menarche onward, most girls quickly learn that their shifts are, at the very least, inconvenient. Fluctuating energy is framed as inconsistency. Emotional sensitivity becomes weakness. Rest becomes indulgence. So we override, implode, or explode. None of these responses helps us mature our capacities. None help us feel initiated.

So we carry on.

Estrogen provides a remarkable capacity to accommodate. We learn to smooth, manage, optimise, and perform. We internalise the idea that our expansive days are our real selves and our contracting days are deviations.

Over time, cyclical intelligence becomes muted. This adaptation may appear as resilience from the outside. Inside, something more subtle is happening: mistrust.

When internal signals are repeatedly overridden, the body becomes unfamiliar territory. Timing is outsourced to calendars. Worth is outsourced to productivity. Legitimacy is outsourced to external validation. We become lost to ourselves, unhinged, ungrounded.

I would like to think that with age, this naturally changes, but that isn’t necessarily true. My grandmothers struggled with resentment, frustration, and lack of recognition. Bits of power visible to those who could see. Much of it stayed dormant.

This erosion is gradual and cumulative, and its repercussions are enormous. What did we say at the beginning of this piece about unmediated power?

Contrary to what some may assume, Cycle Dysphoria does not only affect women. Modern men are also shaped by a culture that denies circadian, seasonal, emotional, and relational rhythm. Testosterone can sustain prolonged output, but not indefinitely. Burnout, disconnection, and volatility follow.

Women often become the early warning system because, as we’ve seen, their hormonal rhythms amplify misalignment more visibly. Irregular cycles, intense mood oscillations, cysts, infertility, endometriosis, “mental health issues”, these are not random malfunctions but signals of a deeper structural mismatch between body and world.

Modernity tends to interpret distress as a defect.

Cycle Dysphoria asks a different question: what if distress is information?

What if anxiety, irritability, exhaustion, heavy bleeding, and withdrawal, “craziness” are not signs of personal failure, but signals that a cyclical organism is attempting to live inside a linear design?

When we suppress the signal without examining the structure, the message disappears, but the misalignment remains.

This becomes most visible at transition points: menarche, pregnancy, early motherhood, perimenopause, and menopause. Each intensifies signalling. Each demands a renegotiation of rhythm and identity.

In cultures with intact rites of passage, these transitions are held collectively. They are named, marked, and integrated.

In modern culture, they are privatised. Women cross thresholds alone while maintaining performance.

As we’ve touched on in previous essays, no amount of self-discipline can reconcile a structural mismatch between cyclical intelligence and systems built on perpetual ascent.

Naming Cycle Dysphoria does not dissolve it, but it redirects the inquiry.

Instead of asking, What is wrong with me? What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with us? We begin to ask: What is this sensation or relationship revealing about the environment and values we inhabit?

That shift restores dignity to fluctuation. It reframes contraction as movement rather than malfunction and invites re-patterning rather than self-correction.

Here is something to ponder upon.

If we can look at our lives and begin to see where Cycle Dysphoria took hold, where it shaped our awareness, our relationships, our values, and where it created mistrust, it is a sign the spell is already beginning to break.

I’m curious about what has come up for you. Please comment if you feel called. Your reflections are always a source of inspiration for my writing.

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In the next essay, we will explore how Cycle Dysphoria shapes relationships, work structures, gender dynamics, and the narratives through which we interpret both personal and collective crises.

Stay tuned. :-)

Our current worldviews have become stuck and rigid. If this article brings more flexibility to your thinking and more curiosity to your engagement with life, that is a sign the spell is beginning to crack. If you have missed the first essay on modernity’s spell, see it here.

This is gentle work. Not dogmatic work. I don’t ask you to agree with me. I ask you to challenge your own ways and to cultivate an intense curiosity about the frames you may have held dear…

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If the matriarch is born through menopause, and if she requires recognition to fully arrive, then a difficult truth follows:

Modernity is not neutral toward her.

It actively works against the conditions she needs to exist.

This isn’t because modernity is actively malicious. But because it was built around a very different relationship to time, value, and the body. One that leaves little room for cyclical intelligence, especially when that intelligence can no longer be easily instrumentalised.

If modern systems excel at organising production, they are far less skilled at honouring thresholds.

Our problem-solving mindset just doesn’t work with thresholds, because thresholds aren’t problems to be solved. They are moments that require pause, witnessing, and reorientation.

Birth, death, menarche, and menopause were never meant to be efficient transitions. They don’t run on schedules. They ask for attention rather than acceleration.

Modernity, as we know, has no time for them. It prefers continuity over discontinuity, output over digestion, consistency over transformation. From the standpoint of modernity, when something cannot be optimised, it is either pathologised (and medicalised) or ignored.

Menopause, in this context, becomes an inconvenience rather than a rite of passage and with that, capacities that were ready to blossom remain latent.

One of modernity’s most powerful moves was to gradually separate biological change from social meaning. This did not happen overnight. It unfolded over centuries as industrialisation, scientific rationalism, and bureaucratic institutions reorganised society around productivity, efficiency, and universal standards.

Rites of passage thinned out. Communal rituals gave way to medical appointments. What had once been interpreted symbolically and socially, menarche, childbirth, menopause, and death, became framed primarily as physiological events to be managed, optimised, or corrected. Biological transitions were relocated from the village circle to the clinic, from shared story to individual symptom. Meaning drained out, even as scientific knowledge expanded.

The body still transforms; it always will, but culture no longer knows how to respond. There are no collective pauses, no shared frames, no recognised shifts in role or authority.

So the change happens in isolation.

A woman’s hormonal and neurological life reorganises, but the world keeps asking her to perform as if nothing has changed. Worse, it often treats the change as a decline.

This creates a profound mismatch.

The body has crossed a threshold. Culture has not.

This is one of the main reasons so many modern women experience menopause not only as physically intense, but also as existentially disorienting.

They are no longer who they were, but they are not recognised as who they are becoming.

Without mirrors, the psyche struggles to stabilise. Without reception, authority turns inward and curdles into self-doubt or reactivity.

This is not a personal failure. It is what happens when rites of passage are reduced to symptoms.

Modernity also struggles with the matriarch because she does not move at the speed the system prefers.

If needed, she will slow things right down. Not by resisting change, but by insisting on “right timing”. She may do it “clumsily”, even unconsciously, simply by asking inconvenient questions: Should we move on with this? Has it been digested? What is being bypassed? What will this cost later?

In a culture addicted to momentum, these questions can feel obstructive.

So her intelligence is often dismissed as negativity, nostalgia, or obstruction, especially when voiced by women who are no longer softened by hormonal appeasement or by the allure of beauty.

What looks like “difficulty” is often discernment, but without a “seat at the table”, she has to fight to have her voice heard.

There is another layer here that is rarely spoken about.

Modernity tends to value women when their energy is extractable. When it can be harnessed for productivity, caregiving, emotional labour, or aesthetic display.

Post-menopausal women do not present themselves in the same way.

Their energy changes quality. Their tolerance for nonsense drops. Their willingness to smooth over dysfunction diminishes. Their attention becomes more selective.

This is not convenient for systems that rely on female compliance to keep running.

So the matriarch is subtly sidelined. At times with force, but mostly with unconscious (or conscious) neglect.

When this happens at scale, something strange occurs.

Women still carry matriarchal intelligence in their bodies, but they have nowhere to place it. No role that legitimises it. No cultural invitation to step into it.

Some women internalise this and shrink. Some become brittle. Some become angry.
Some go quiet. Some keep working twice as hard, hoping to be recognised anyway.

All of these responses make sense in a culture that has forgotten how to receive its elders.

The tragedy is not that the matriarch is absent. The tragedy is that she is ready to take her place, but culture is not ready for her.

And because modernity frames everything as an individual problem, women are left trying to resolve a structural absence through personal effort.

No amount of self-work can substitute cultural witnessing. No amount of confidence can replace a missing role.

This is why “bringing back the Matriarch” cannot mean asking individual women to carry more, fix more, or embody more.

It means changing the conditions that prevent her from fully arriving.

You may find her in contexts where time is not optimised, where transitions are marked rather than minimised, where communities know how to say: we see you now.

Without these conditions, even the most grounded woman will struggle to trust what she knows.

And, if you remember my last post, the Matriarch is a collective of matriarchs. She lives in the space between women who remember their role as the keepers of rhythm.

Modernity has lost its rhythm, and the Matriarch may be the conductor we’ve been waiting for. If only we could see Her.

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To be continued…

Now take a moment to reflect on your personal relationship with the matriarch. Where is she in your life? What could you do to bring her out (even more)?

What about the capital “M” Matriarch? The collective of matriarchs. Can you see Her in culture? Where? How? How could we help bring Her out?

Hi everyone.

In my last post, I introduced the notion of a spell that has been cast in modernity (well, before, really, but it’s very visible now) and how women have been the most affected by it. Mostly unconsciously.

Before we go deep into the weeds of the spell and how it interacts with us all, I thought I could introduce you to our master spell-breaker. Because, quite frankly, with the speed of change these days, we need a master spell-breaker.

She is… a we, not an I. SHE is “the Matriarch.” Capital “M” Matriarch.

Let me introduce you to HER slowly. Before our minds fill in the blanks with assumptions and projections.

I’m curious. What happens for you when you hear the word matriarch?

(This is an actual question! :-))

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Do images of domination, rigidity, or outdated hierarchies rush in? Or is there a quiet dismissal? A subtle judgement?

If so, it’s not surprising. The Matriarch has long been poorly understood.

Part of that misunderstanding comes from trying to make her into a personality, a role, or an identity, something an older woman simply is, rather than something a culture must bring forth.

But the Matriarch was never meant to be a type of woman. Not as I see it.

She was a function.

For most of human history, cultures relied on people who were not primarily organisers, warriors, innovators, or producers, but timers.

These people, often an older women, were attuned to “right timing.”

She would know, in her body, when something had ripened and was ready to be born. She knew when something was being pushed too soon, trying to make its way into the world prematurely.

She knew when a threshold was near. She did not force it into being. In this, she was like the rainmaker - not actually making the rain happen - but listening for the subtle shift in the air that meant it was already on its way.

To sense when it is time to birth, to stop, to harvest, or to let something die is no small capacity. It is embodied morality, a responsiveness calibrated to the rhythm of life itself. A way of aligning action with the season of things.

In modernity, these capacities have mostly gone underground. Without this attunement, we don’t know when to act, when to wait, when to “weed” around promising new ideas and when to let outdated ones die.

This capacity, or let’s call it a sense organ, isn’t mystical. It is ecological.

It is the natural consequence of living inside cycles long enough to recognise their innate pattern of birth, growth, harvest, decay, death, and return. Repetition trains embodied attunement and discernment.

This is not simply a thought. It is also a thought, but one that feels like whole-body knowing.

In tribal times, this was, of course, done largely unconsciously. Rituals were performed as whole-body prayers for what was being born: a baby, a marriage, a young woman or man crossing into adulthood.

Rituals were not arbitrary; they were deeply connected to what was emerging and what had come before. They held the past while directing energy and collective attention toward the future. Rituals and rites guided the tribe’s behaviour around births, harvests, and deaths.

Older women, the matriarchs, were shaped into this role because cyclical embodiment, over time, cultivated a different relationship to time and timing, and a deep attunement to what the next moment required.

The Matriarch did not lead through force, like male leaders often did. She regulated the collective through timing, setting boundaries, and holding perspective.

It’s important to be clear here:

The matriarch is not simply an older woman, nor is she available at any age. The capital “M” “Matriarch” is a collective of “matriarchs”.

Let’s go slowly.

The matriarch, as an individual, is born through the rite of passage of menopause.

Menopause is not merely the cessation of bleeding. It is a profound neurological and hormonal reorganisation in which new neural pathways form. A woman’s hormonal life fundamentally changes as she moves out of the monthly oscillation that shaped her earlier decades.

This matters.

Freed from cyclical fluctuations, she develops a different relationship with time, urgency, and emotion. She is no longer pulled into the tides in the same way. This places her biologically and perceptually in a unique position.

Not above life, but outside the cycle she once lived inside.

This is what allows her to see patterns rather than live at the mercy of the tides.

But menopause alone does not make a matriarch.

It is a rite of passage, and like all rites of passage, it has two halves.

The first half happens in the body and psyche: the hormonal shift, the neurological rewiring, the psychological reckoning, the letting go of identities that no longer fit.

The second half must happen in relationship.

For the matriarch to fully arrive, she must be received.

She must be seen by others as having crossed a threshold. Evoked into a new role. Reflected back not as a woman who has lost something, but as a woman who now carries a different kind of authority.

Without this reception, the transition can stall.

And in modernity, sadly, it often does.

What we often see on the other side of menopause is that the modern woman may feel invisible rather than initiated, insecure about ageing rather than excited for what is emerging, reactive rather than spacious.

This is not because she has failed, but because no one can complete a rite of passage alone.

The picture is even more sobering.

Modernity makes it almost impossible for a mature woman to see herself as going through a rite of passage when approaching menopause. In fact, it constantly offers her “ways out,” as if the rite of passage itself were a meaningless nuisance that should be avoided or managed away.

The bodily changes one might expect to naturally occur are often prevented by modern interventions. HRT (hormone replacement therapy), for example, is designed to give back to the body what the body is naturally weaning from.

For me, it is less about the action itself and more about the type of mind that creates “perceived” solutions in the first place. What kind of mind would see menopause simply as diminishment? What kind of mind creates breastfeeding schedules? Or a planned caesarean?

At this point in the article, it is important that I say that, whereas I can be provocative in my thinking, I hold no personal judgment of each individual’s choice. Truly. There is simply compassion for us all surviving modernity in the best way we know how.

But back to the provocations… ;-)

What I see is a culture obsessed with productivity that has little patience for women who no longer produce in the same way. A culture fixated on youth that does not know what to do with women whose power has changed shape rather than diminished.

This mindset, so normalised by modernity’s standards, is a major consequence of the Spell we spoke of in the last article.

In this context, even if women are able to move naturally through the rite of passage of menopause, many emerge biologically transformed but culturally orphaned. There are no communal markers, no shared language, no collective pause that says: something has changed, and it deeply matters, for her and for us all.

We are left with words that describe aspects of our transformation through the lens of lack and pathology. And with these words, we create culture.

Brain fog, mental fatigue, tiredness, reduced focus, moodiness, anxiety, hot flashes, etc. (We’ll explore this more deeply in future articles.)

And so we, modern women, arrive as elders from broken lineages, perpetuated by the spell.

When this negative and extremely myopic framing of a rite of passage happens at scale, the matriarch, and all the capacities she could hold, remain latent in her and in culture. In our times, they have gone so deeply underground that they have mostly disappeared from our collective consciousness.

Unlike what happens in many indigenous cultures, the modern matriarch may feel her acquired wisdom has no seat. That her perspective has no mirror. That her authority has no cultural legitimacy.

What remains is often insecurity and frustration, personal, relational, generational, when what is actually missing is recognition. Even from herself.

In cultures with well-defined roles, rites, and recognition, the matriarch would be a natural evolution of a woman’s life. She would embody a role she is recognised for. In modernity, as we’ve seen, it does not work this way.

What happens then when we have partially initiated elders and a culture that desperately needs guidance?

This is when the Matriarch (capital “M”) as a collective force is born.

Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with gold, offers a living metaphor for this collective emergence. She is not one perfected woman standing whole and intact. Each of us carries gifts, and each of us carries fractures - distortions shaped by modernity’s spell. On our own, we may feel immobilised by the cracks. We may feel insufficient or “useless” in a culture that values seamless productivity. I know I’ve felt like that many times.

It is when we come into right relationship with one another that something different happens.

SHE arrives.The Matriarch.

In HER, what was fragmented becomes patterned. The spell that cracked us as individuals has not broken the whole.

The Matriarch is the new vessel born between us, not despite the cracks, but because of them. She is most visible where the fractures once were and where, through connection, gold now runs.

SHE, the master spell-breaker, matches the depth of our forgetfulness in vastness and power.

This is precisely the intelligence our times require. It is HER who will redirect energy when it’s too much, who will remind us what we should be giving birth to, and what we should value.

If you haven’t guessed, it’s not just power and money.

The good news is: SHE is back. In collectives, you’ll find HER.

Have you already found HER? Let us know.

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Stay tuned… more to come. We are just starting our spell-breaking journey. :-)

Once again, you don’t need to agree with what you’ve read. Simply notice how it landed.

Did you feel recognised, unsettled, sceptical, relieved, or unexpectedly emotional?

None of those responses is a problem.

They are information.

Spell-breaking information.

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Hi everyone,

As promised, in the coming weeks, maybe even months, I’ll share articles either from my (still-in-progress) book or inspired by it. Most pieces have never been shared and I am excited to start this journey with you all.

Before we start, I’d like to invite you to read this series of essays with a soft gaze and curious stance.

Now, if you can, brew yourself a cup of tea or something you would like to drink, light a candle or an incense, put your phone in silence for just five minutes, and make some space for our short time together.

As you will see, these simple practices can be incredibly powerful spell-breaking tools.

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The Spell We Are Living Inside

I’ve never met a woman who wakes up thinking. “It’s all ok, we are just under a spell”.

She wakes up feeling tired. Or chronically depleted, with no zest for life. But who has time for zest for life, anyway?

She wakes up thinking she is behind.

Behind on rest. Behind on clarity. Behind in knowing what she wants. Behind on being whatever invisible standard seems to be humming beneath our modern life constructs.

Because these feelings are so widespread, so quietly shared, they rarely get questioned. “We all feel this way”, it’s what I hear often. Or, “it is hard for everyone, isn’t it”? Followed by “ there’s no point complaining”.

A blanket of togetherness to subside the pain.

This sense of not feeling “quite right” has become so normal that we see it as “this is how things are”. But this individual and collective numbness is what keeps the spell in check.

Worse.

Now the spell is not only “true” but has also become internalised and interpreted as a personal shortcoming rather than a cultural condition.

This article and the ones to follow will explore the mechanisms of this pervading sense of inadequacy.

The good news is, none of it is personal.

To explore the intricacies of our individual and collective sense of “failings,” we have to understand the power of spells.

As I wrote in my book,

A spell is a state of enchantment or illusion that alters perception, often without our awareness. Powerful spells impact not only the individual but entire collectives and can last centuries. They lead us to believe things unquestioningly and see the world through distorted lens.

Spells are also :

• Not necessarily cast by an individual, but rather emerges from collective belief, habit, language, and omission.

• Cumulative - formed by a series of tiny errors, social norms, distortions, or silences that over time solidify into a kind of psychic or cultural fog.

• Self-reinforcing - because no one individual created it, it’s harder to trace or confront, and so it persists, woven into the fabric of “normal.”

• Subtle yet powerful - once a spell is set in culture, it becomes the water we swim in, raise our children, and create systems from. It can shape entire lives or societies.

In my work, I use the word spell deliberately. Not as metaphorical fluff, but as a precise description of how culture works when it becomes invisible to itself. A spell is simply a story so thoroughly absorbed that it feels like reality.

Modernity’s spell didn’t announce itself. It hums over all we do and have become.

It hums through assumptions we rarely examine: that faster is better, that consistency equals competence, that productivity signals worth, that value equals money, that bodies should behave predictably, that emotions are noise, that time is something to manage rather than inhabit.

None of these ideas is entirely wrong. But spells don’t work because they are false; they work because they are partial and presented as complete.

Something essential was left out.

One of the first things modernity quietly removed was rhythm.

The natural alternation between action and rest, expansion and contraction, certainty and not-knowing. The intelligence that lives on “right timing” and that the female tidal body knows so well.

Modern systems flattened time. They asked us to live as if every day were the same day. As if energy were constant. As if bodies were machines with stable outputs.

Women felt this first and more strongly. Not because we are weaker, but because we are cyclical by design. Hormonal rhythms, reproductive thresholds, and seasonal sensitivity were never meant to be inconveniences. They are forms of perception lost to the modern creature.

When rhythm is removed from a culture, the instrument doesn’t shatter.
It goes subtly out of tune.

Most women don’t see this misalignment as a cultural issue. They say things like this instead, “I should be coping better. Other women seem to manage. Once this phase passes, I’ll be fine.”

By blaming ourselves every time our bodies attempt to guide us back into rhythm, the spell sustains itself. Systemic misalignment becomes private self-doubt. The spell is now set.

For most of human history, cultures relied on people who tracked timing rather than clocks. People who sensed thresholds, when to birth, when to wait, when to grieve, when to harvest, when to stop pushing and start listening.

These people were mostly women. Older women. Not because older women were superior, but because years of cyclical embodiment trained a different kind of perception. An attunement to life itself. This attunement worked as the “moral compass” of a tribe or a collective.

As hard as it is for our hyper-individual mind to grasp, the role of bringing us back to rhythm is not held by an individual, nor is it an identity. It is the regulatory function of collectives, vital for the health of society.

I call HER the Matriarch.

Modernity dismantled that function without replacing it.

And when rhythm disappears, everything speeds up. But nothing ripens.

Burnout becomes a personal failure. Menopause is a pathology, not initiation. Adolescence is not held or guided, producing generations of immature adults. Our elders are sidelined, and their stories lost.

We become very good at surviving, and increasingly poor at living with any sense of meaning.

So, what now?

How about we start by bringing the Matriarch back?

(to be continued next week…)

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As you read this, did you feel relieved? Annoyed? Sceptical? Seen? Defensive? Tired? Curious?

These pieces of information will help you notice the spell. Your response to what you have read is your bespoke medicine.

Because, as you will see, spells don’t live only in ideas. They live in nervous systems.

If it feels supportive, you might want to jot down what comes up, or mention it to someone you trust. Or simply sit with the question: Where in my life do I feel out of rhythm, but blame myself for it?

Nothing needs resolving yet.

Just noticing is enough.

I want to start with an apology, especially to those of you who found this Substack because you were recommended it, listened to a podcast, or resonated with something I wrote.

Over the past year, I’ve let this space go quieter than I intended. And because so much of my work is communal work, that doesn’t sit lightly with me. If you’re here, you matter to me, so I’m sorry for dropping the ball.

My honest explanation is this: I spent a large part of last year writing the first draft of a book, and it took far more of me than I could have imagined. Seasoned authors probably know this well. I didn’t, and in a strange way, I’m glad I was naïve about it.

Now, a little about the present…

I’m currently moving into the second draft of the book and working closely with a dear friend and writing wizard, Lia Haro. I feel genuinely honoured that she said yes to working with me on this project.

At the same time, I’m building a website that will house my courses, in-person retreats and workshops, as well as my online offerings. It will also introduce many of the frames I’ve been living and working with over the past year.

While the book itself won’t be finished or published for a while, I already have many pages of writing, some of which may never make it into the final draft.

And this is where you come in.

A little about the future…and what’s coming in 2026 and beyond…

My intention for this Substack is to share, first-hand, the frames that will eventually live in the book. I’ll be taking you through what I call a spell-breaking journey, where we look at, define, and work with the spell modernity has cast on women and, by extension, on the world.

The book lays this out in a more thorough and hopefully playful way. Breaking spells is hard work, so playfulness is not optional.

I’ll also be launching a podcast in the coming months, which will bring the book to life. The podcast will sit right in the messy middle where spells meet bodies, lives, relationships, and systems. I’ll be working with collaborators on this, and I’m really excited about where it’s heading. I’ll share more soon.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll also clean up the layout of this Substack and give it a fresh 2026 look. Everything that’s already here will remain accessible in the archives.

So… what’s in it for you?

That’s partly for you to decide.

This picture shows the harvest of one of my favourite projects of 2025. Collective gardening. Also part of Spell-breaking. (I’ll share more in future posts) Doesn’t that image make you smile?

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I do take strong positions in my work, but I can’t speak directly to every individual’s life. What I can do is name who I think this work will most directly support, and you can tell me if I’ve got that right.

• Perimenopausal and postmenopausal women: you are a central focus of my work this year. If this is you, stay tuned. There’s a lot coming.
  
  

• Partners of peri- and post-menopausal women: if you’re a modern man, there’s a good chance you were never taught much about this transition, especially in the context of modern life. If deeper intimacy and understanding matter to you, this space may be useful.
  
  

• Mothers of girls (especially teenage girls), fathers, educators, and therapists: many of the frames we’ll explore here may support your work and relationships. Please let me know if they don’t.
  
  

• Women in general: There will be plenty here for you, too.
  
  

• Gender-diverse folks: Some thoughtful collaborations are coming later in the year. I want to first build a shared language and a solid foundation around what I’m calling the Spell of Modernity. Once that’s in place, we can move into more complex and sensitive territory together.
  
  

• Creative thinkers, people working in health, embodiment, philosophy, futurists: while much of my work is grounded in everyday lived experience, it is also deeply philosophical and metaphysical. I don’t imagine you’ll be bored.
  
  

From next week, I’ll be writing here regularly and preparing the soil for the podcast. We’ll begin the spell-breaking journey step by step.

The podcast and articles will act as catalysts, but this Substack is where we can slow down and explore how each topic actually lands in your life. This is where the work becomes personal.

Once a month, starting in February, I’ll be hosting spell-breaking sessions. For the first few months, these will be open to everyone. Later on, they’ll be reserved for paid subscribers.

As you’ll see, a lot of this work takes time, energy, and care, and much of it is unpaid. That, too, is part of the spell we’ll be unpacking (how modern culture values what it values). If you’d like to support this work and take part in the monthly calls, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This work isn’t meant to be done alone. Spell-breaking is collective work. If you can, gather a small group of trusted people, or people you’d like to know more deeply, and explore the topics together. This will make more sense as we go.

Thank you for being here, despite the long, quiet stretch. And if you realise this isn’t the right space for you, no hard feelings at all.

I’m really looking forward to connecting more deeply with you in the coming weeks and months.

With love and a lot of gratitude,
Adriana

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Dear Friends,

This is an invitation to go deeper into one of my favourite topics: The wisdom of The Magah/Mage/Matriarch.

Together, in community, we will explore this transformational, liminal and often inexplicable archetypal phase.

This women’s emergent workshop will be a weaving of your presence with mine and Tracy’s shared passions & gifts around the mysteries of The Magah through women’s cyclical wisdom, storytelling, self inquiry, ritual and somatic practice.

If you are new to the phase of the Mage/Magah have a listen to my conversation with Tracy for her podcast A Year & A Day (https://open.substack.com/.../the-season-of-the...)

Space is limited to 12 participants to keep things intimate and connective. We need a minimum of 7 to run the workshop.

Also may also be possible to register for the recording only, please email Tracy @ tlchipman@gmail.com for more info.

Please help us spread the word to your loves who might be keen to dive in here.

When?

December 2 | 6 – 8:30pm CST

December 3 | 11- 1:30 pm Sydney Time

Tiered Pricing:

(40USD or 60AUD) - supported by others
(55USD or 85AUD) - general rate
(70USD - 110AUD) - supporting others.

** there are two partial scholarships available please email Tracy at tlchipman@gmail.com for more info.

What we will explore & experience:

Coming together & exploring together in community.
Connecting with gifts of The Mage/Magah/Matriarch through women’s wisdom & mythology
Through somatic movement, gentle inquiry, journaling & optional sharing, explore your relationship with paradox, intuition and The Magah within you.
Participate in a co-created group ritual, releasing what needs releasing, meeting your body where it is at now and opening to the harvest of The Magah.
Learning accessible body-based practices to help you accompany yourself into and through this alchemical transitional phase.

What to Bring:

Dress comfortably
Have private space to sit and lie down.
Journaling materials – paper/pen and/or tech device.
A few ritual supplies – paper, pen/pencil, candle, water & optional altar**
Water, tea, etc.
**An altar can be as small and simple as a plate with stones, images, plants, seeds, sacred objects, etc. Please share with a friend who might be interested. This workshop is open to women folx.

Tracy is a generator, connector and mentor weaving transformational storytelling, trauma aware body-based practices, writing and emotional education inviting us towards more embodied presence, self-knowledge & wholeness in the whole mess. Tracy’s podcast, A Year & A Day is a 13 month journey exploring women’s cyclicity through story & emergent collaboration. Also In March 2023 Tracy published her first book, Borealis Mundi - Resting in Place, Loss & Grace. Please visit her website to learn more about her work. https://allheredwellfree.substack.com/podcast

REGISTRATION LINK: https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSfKz8SYU0a.../viewform...

Unless there is a family emergency, we are unable to refund your payment if you need to cancel.
Once you’d submitted this and payment is received you will be registered and receive a confirmation email.

We are so excited to journey together soon!
Tracy & Adriana

Ps: if you can’t come but would like to be informed of future offerings, please contact us.

I’d love to hold a second session at some point if there is thirst. So let me know if you are keen!

I have been working with women quite a lot recently. I have been creating small, intimate retreats dedicated to the transition of peri-menopause, menopause and beyond.

I love it because it's an absolute honour to facilitate a group of wise women. There is so much wisdom in the room, and my role is more of a maestro, who simply guides the group of very talented and skilled musicians into creating something wonderful together.

So the work itself is beautiful, and through it, I get to meet the most amazing women.

But, and there is a BUT…many women who are keen to do this work are not financially stable. Unfortunately, this is one of the very visible and sad by-products of our current capitalist model. Many of the women who come to my work are single parents, and I, in all honesty, don’t know how their bodies can manage so much continuous stress. They are pretty amazing women!

The sadness for me is in “saying no” to some women who want and should (because if they want they should) come to these retreats or online experiences, but have no financial capacity to do so.

Sadly, I am not yet in a position where I can work for free, so this leaves me in a…

PICKLE!

I have been lucky to have never had to say a “full no” to anyone who has wanted to work with me. I have created partial scholarships, experimented with barter (which is unfortunately not sustainable), and occasionally had sponsors.

I am now in this situation once more. Every time I put out a new retreat, there are usually one or two people who would love to come but can’t. So I decided to put this out there to my wider online community and see if you can enlighten me with your wisdom.

In an ideal world, I’d love to work under an entirely different financial model at some point, but I don’t quite know what that'd look like. In the meantime, any support and ideas would be greatly appreciated.

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On another note…

We are deep in Winter here in Australia, and I am feeling this hibernation energy quite strongly. Once the Earth's cycle brings more light and movement in early Spring, I’d love to start involving this community in my book-writing process.

I've been posting on Substack quite irregularly lately. The reason for that is that I have been dedicating my time mostly to my book and also working with people (coaching or group work).

I also hit a wall with my articles. I now feel this need to move deeper into the work, to be more granular, more nuanced, and the articles were not “doing it”. So, the only way I found to deepen my work was through writing a book.

I wasn’t sure how to reconcile these seemingly very different worlds. The world of book writing and the world of popping frequent articles, but a friend suggested that I start sharing my writing on Substack. Even (especially) the unfinished parts and the parts that may never make the light of day once I edit the book.

So…here goes another question. Would you be interested in collaborating on this writing project?

Exploring the various ways in which we can live in harmony with the cyclical rhythm of life itself is my happy place, and I’d love to create more opportunities for collaborations. Feel free to reach out!

With love,

Adriana

I am, obviously, being overly simplistic because I don’t want to over burden my dear readers with the worlds within worlds contained in “stuff”.

What matters, for the sake of this short piece, is that tomorrow, I’ll have the rare opportunity to play in these “two worlds”. Simultaneously. Imagine that. Not just “women’s stuff”, not just “Integral stuff” but both.

This is a very last minute invitation for you to join me and others in an exploration of female development through a different lens.

The session won’t be recorded so, if you are interested, you’ll need to show up. :-)

Details for the event here.

Date

Jun 26 2025 (US)

3:00 pm - 4:30 pm (not sure what time zone in the US)

Timezone: Australia/Sydney Jun 27 2025

8:00 am - 9:30 am

The reason why it means so much to me is because I haven’t offered anything special or extra for my paid subscribers. No special posts (till now!), no extra content…nothing. Yet, here you are, making a contribution to my work.

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There’s so much I could say about this conversation—the mix of people, the timing, the kind of question that shapes and provokes us. The alchemy that becomes possible.

Some of you might remember that when I first started C-Lab, it had a different name: Fine Line Full Circle. My vision then, as it still is now, was to explore the dance between men and women, between masculine and feminine principles, and all that these polarities represent in and around us.

But after a year, I realized we weren’t quite ready to dance. First, we needed to learn the steps.

So much of my work since then has had the flavor of teaching, sharing, and provoking new ways of thinking. But I also love dancing with others—intellectually, through ritual spaces, creative projects, and deep conversations. And there has been plenty of that too.

This conversation, however, felt special. It marked a shift. A moment where I saw that yes, Fine Line Full Circle is becoming possible. Culture is moving fast.

I believe many of us are now ready to dance together more freely—with generosity, creativity, and deep respect. And I believe the world needs that.

If you enjoy this conversation and would like to deepen this exploration, reach out. and C-lab would love nothing more than to deepen some of the threads that have been opened there.

https://www.voicecraft.io/content/e123-men-women-and-war-w/-pamela-von-sabljar-adriana-forte-simon-van-der-els-tim-adalin

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CLab

A cyclically informed culture in the making where we co-design systems that integrate the menstrual cycle, and more generally, a cyclical worldview.

By Adriana Forte

Here is C-Lab (and specially in my book) I talk about the "broken mirror effect"—what happens when we mistake a partial perspective for the whole.

When we don’t see ourselves reflected in the world of thought and theory, it can feel like we either have to fight to be heard or wonder if we have anything to offer at all.

But we do. And now, more than ever, the world needs it.

We’re in a moment of profound transition—where hyper-individualism and exponential tech are pushing up against the values that are woven into the fabric of being a woman.

She nurtures, she cares, she creates, and she does deep philosophy, physics, science, meta-theory and more. But what happens when her way of thinking doesn’t fit the existing models? What if her genius never fully emerges because the world hasn’t yet learned how to see it?

This session is about making those ways visible.

Join Danielle Johnson (Limicon’s mother and meta-theorist, amongst other things), Bri High ( philosopher working on her PhD in Physics/Science and more) and Adriana Forte (founder of C-Lab, mum, partner, writer and new-found philosopher, amongst other things) for a 90-minute conversation where they’ll share their journeys (45 min) and then invite you into the discussion (45 min).

Let’s explore together how bias and expectation shape what we see, what we value, and how we show up.

We’d love to have you there.

The session will be at 8:00 am AEDT on the 28th of March, 6:00 pm ET on the 27th of March. Confusing!!

Join Session here

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I wish you were here, in my living room, having a cup of tea with me, or maybe something stronger. I wish I could look into your eyes and see how this lands for you. I wish I could hear something back. A simple I see this too or even Sorry, I can’t relate. Anything.

Because this whole world of “broadcasting” still feels strange to me, even though I’ve been doing it for a while. And sharing something sacred, something vulnerable, feels especially weird in this space. Normally, if we were at a dinner party, I’d pause before speaking, sensing whether it was the right time, the right people. But here, when we share at scale, that’s impossible.

So I have to trust. Trust that whoever reads, listens, or watches will be a worthy recipient of something tender. The same way we don’t invite just anyone into the room when a child is born, or when a loved one takes their last breath, there’s a sacredness in sharing something raw. And that sacredness only exists if it’s received in the right way.

It’s sacred because it’s honest, because it cracks us open, because it reveals what we so often rush past in our busy lives.

If you stay with me, stay present, stay in your body, this can become shared sacredness. It has the potential to be beautiful. To heal. To connect.

We live in a culture obsessed with being unbreakable, invincible, untouchable. But no matter how hard we try to hide it, the cracks are showing. We are breaking. We are broken.

And yet—through the cracks, the light gets in.

I wrote this poem in one sitting. It came and took me over. It’s raw. It’s intimate. And I hope you’ll receive it in that same spirit.

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Let it be what it is. Let it move you. Maybe it will even crack your heart open. And if it does, let it.

The poem is called Kintsugi.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, silver, or platinum, highlighting the cracks rather than hiding them. It’s rooted in the philosophy of wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection, of impermanence. Kintsugi transforms something broken into something even more precious. A reminder that our scars don’t make us less, they make us more.

But here’s the thing: for kintsugi to exist, there must first be broken pieces.

Our culture is cracking. We can’t stop it. But maybe, just maybe, we can gather up the fragments, cover them in gold, and turn them into something beautiful.

Kintsugi. - Healing the broken lineage together. (if you prefer reading, here it is)

I’m broken.

I am broken.

I AM broken.

I am BROKEN

We are broken.

But don’t turn around

Please don’t switch off.

Stay present with me.

Because I need you to see.

Don’t you put me

in the corner just yet.

Where dusty and

lifeless

things live.

There is life force

inside me

And I still want to give

But first,

I need you to see

That I AM

In fact

Completely

And utterly

Broken.

Broken pieces of me

Broken pieces of you

Have been

Scattered

around the Earth

For way too long

A mosaic of broken

Women

Crying tears

Of unfelt grief

Infertile wombs

Cold and empty

Stagnant energy

With no pulse

Lineages of

broken bodies

And broken hearts

Perpetuating

The delusion

And the confusion

That says the answer is

To fight

Modernity

With its insanity

Whispered

into my ears

Soulless tales

Of power and greed.

Swayed by my female cycle

That is

By nature trusting

I agreed.

And I played a role that does not

Honour

What I came here

To this Earth

To give.

I care for the world,

You see.

I hold the hands of your

dying friends

As they exhale themselves

Back into

The mystery

But make no mistake

I am not naive

Even though

That may be what you believe

You think I can’t see

The stupidity

Often displayed by our

Stubborn in-humanity

Let me tell you.

You are wrong.

I am not naive.

But you see,

the world will

Kill itself

If I don’t believe.

So I do.

And so should you.

I have to confess

It’s been a tad confusing.

Modernity’s values

Entered inside me

So deeply

That I enacted

all I could see.

And Modernity said

The life cycle

Yes, the one that lives in my body

has no value

In it for me

So I forgot

To be cyclical.

And became,

Well…mechanical

a bit hysterical

But that's a fucking joke.

Because my role

is to be magical.

Denying my cycle

Extinguished my magic

It dried out my spark

It’s made me lethargic

To the point

That all I could see

All around me

And everywhere else

Were tales

That confirmed the state

Of my broken self.

These tales

Kept telling me

It’s unsafe

to give birth,

Unprofitable to care

Unnatural to nurse.

Ok, I can’t give birth,

I say.

Please tell me what to do, doc

So, I know how to behave.

We’ll gladly help, they say

So they lay me into a bed

My legs widely spread

My soul no longer there.

And I blankly stare at the ceiling

Apologetic and shy

As I watch sharp metal tools

Suck my power

As I stifle

A cry

But it doesn’t end there.

With no recognition

Of my sacred role

as life-giver

And life keeper

The milk inside my breasts dry

Like a dead river.

I can’t breastfeed I think.

I am good for no thing.

And all along, I blame myself.

How can’t I give birth on my back,

With my legs limp and strapped?

What's wrong with me

I ask.

Maybe

My love is too wild

My care is too strong

My energy is too inviting

My rhythm must be wrong.

Over and over, I have given thanks

To modernity

Thank you

For stripping me of

My sanity

For shaping me so well

So I could fit

In the story

that you wanted me tell.

I’ve been dammed

Like a body of water

that we wish not to move

Like a good piece of music

we don’t know how to

groove.

Like an energy that is too wild

I’ve been dammed and damned.

But now I am awake.

And I see.

The DAMMAGE.

I am not blind anymore.

to all the ways I have agreed

to give away my core

I did let myself go

So I could fit into

this broken world.

But our diluted version of reality

has gone way too far.

So now, please listen when I say

No

Fake tan

Is not the same as health

Followers And money

Do not equate

to wealth

invaluable

Does not mean

No value

And Invisible

Does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Come sisters,

let the floodgates open

And the waters

Flow wild

There is much to undo

Don’t ask us to be mild

These waters

uproot old trees,

They cut new land

They move big boulders

They take the weight

Off our shoulders.

These waters

Destroy our

tame illusion

that progress

equals safety

And clarity rules

Over confusion.

The swishing sound

Unleashes

the energy

that had locked

Me into

Complacency.

Paralysis calls for

Catharsis

This is, in fact, the first step.

But be mindful,

It cannot stop there.

“Me too”

Moved us forward.

It made us see

through dark veils

How hurtful

Humans can be

And the damage

that it entails

I am a community creature.

And I need all of YOU so I can create.

But I live separately from my sisters

And our love

Has turned to hate.

Like old milk

that has gone sour

We’ve forgotten our ways

And have given

away our power.

For centuries

We either fought

Or despaired

But now

What we need

is to repair.

My role in the world

Is to remind you

of the beauty

Of everyday chores

Where mundane

meets the sacred

And it’s impossible to

be bored.

I am a woman

I’m here

To heal

And to Destroy

I channel

The Light and the dark

Just like

Helen of Troy.

Kintsugi

Turns trash into gold

Art composed

of broken parts.

I am kintsugi

and so are you

We need broken pieces

To create something new.

Your pain is not yours alone, my friend.

We have been made of one single bone

Your broken story is also my story

Let us together

Turn despair into glory.

I am Kintsugi, and so are you

Let us now remember

what is ours to do.

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If you have the time and patience for long conversations, I’d say that this one is a great one to dive into. is a great host and as I feel very comfortable with him I experienced being able to express my thoughts with a lot of ease.

Even the whole concept behind C-Lab - which came from my own mind! - became clearer to me during this conversation! ;-)

Ahhhh…the power of dialectic!

If there are specific aspects of this conversation that ignites you, please reach out and we can have a C-Lab conversation on it.

I’m cooking up some new things for C-Lab in the coming months, so I’ll be in touch soon. As always, thank you for the support!

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