It is not the buffest guy in the room.

Not the man with the most notches on the bedpost who left his soft and supple heart behind.

It is not the man in Andrew Tate’s corner, spouting the good word about gender roles and the ways women need to be protected from themselves, as he pops just another sweet red pill.

The masterful male lover is the honest man.

The kind man.

The intuitive man.

The man who seeks to learn about himself, his body and knows he’s fresher when he meets his own needs first.

The man who asks how someone is feeling and lets the sensation of response touch him.

The man who reads body language, moving closer towards what’s true not what’s ‘hot’.

The man who pays attention.

Who knows he’s not responsible for toxic masculinity but doesn’t pretend it doesn’t exist.

A shoulder shrug and shifty gaze.

The ultimate question that indicates where the night is heading:

‘Shall we get the next drink in?’

A masterful man bravely lets someone love him, all the way in.

The master lover is a role of reverence. A coveted experience of life rooted in care, reciprocity and a desire to learn, fuck up and fall in love.

Mastery is not a destination, it’s a lifelong exploration with no certificate. It invites you to learn about the menstrual cycle, the passage from maiden to mother and relish the less fucks a woman gives when she becomes a Crone.

It’s the awakening, self-actualising, path for a man who picks flowers for himself.

The man who knows he is sensual and deserves softness too. Who brings his body alive and feels more more more.

The imperfect road for a man who secretly cries: ‘no one taught us this shit’. But accepts it’s okay not to know and chooses love over patterns.

A man who cares for the land and sees sex as part of life.

Who takes time in nature to resource and reset.

Who kisses his children and tells them how special they are just for existing.

A man who knows, that it doesn’t matter what you look like, what body God gave you, how chequered your past or complex your defences.

What matters is humanity.

Softness.

Tenderness.

To inhabit wild primal aliveness and save ferocity for roaring pleasure and not bar crawl brawls.

I’m holding a free online intimacy class for men on Tues 1 Sept 7-8.30 pm UK time. I will be guiding a slow, soft and sensual experience where you get to feel a blueprint of what’s possible for real, authentic, human intimacy that can traverse wild fiery passion and soft, fluid non-linearity. This leads to love-making with no hard and fast goal, instead there’s depth and rolling motion. An approach to life that nourishes from the inside out. Impacts that ripple into every corner of your world. You can register here.

I know this because I am aware of the actions of global elites, the power of media houses (who are owned by a very small collection of elite tycoons, aristocrats and families) and I personally witnessed some of the behind the scenes mechanisms of the British press whilst I worked in the centre of British politics in my twenties.

I recently saw a post on Instagram which sparked my attention. A prime example of bollocks, which could be shrugged off as ‘business as usual’.

But if I shrug my shoulders to every single piece of media that makes its way into the world then do I become totally apathetic? And if others are doing the same… do we end up with a culture that cannot read between the lines, discern spin and critically assess or millions of people who do not engage in any mainstream media (which still holds huge power within certain demographics)?

The advent of AI, the constant outsourcing of attention and discernment to virtual assistants, bed fellows called Claude and the increasing propensity of people stealing Instagram is atrophying the capacity to discern what is actually real.

The Mail on Sunday is a leading Sunday newspaper whose readership is mostly an older, middle-market (accessible journalism but not so sensationalist) socially conservative and relatively affluent audience.

They recently published a piece criticising the leader of the Green Party @greenpartyzack saying that the weather this summer has been lovely and akin to a beautiful holiday in the Mediterranean and what’s all the fuss about?

It is finally obvious to the British public that climate crisis impacts are on our doorstep. The UK has never had wildfires, never been this dry and never had a national emergency text message sent to the entire population about fire risk.

The obsession with expansion, extraction and cultural imperialism that has its roots in all British colonisation has come home to roost. We have fully pillaged our own land now. The domestic and global impacts of rising temperatures are undeniable.

YET.

National newspapers still choose to spin stories about political parties, create polarity and write what should be seen as satire but is actually targeted copy directed to speak to societal groups and tell them what they want to hear. To choose to take the piss instead of write the truth.

The papers purposefully write scandal and choose the language, topics and viewpoints that will speak straight to the heart of their readers, to sell papers, make money and support the politicians their owners are in bed with. In this case those more on the right hand side.

Maybe you know this?

Maybe you don’t?

Either way… if you’re engaging with my work and writing… I’m inviting you to be alert and to use your own intuition, engage your critical thinking and keep your eyes and ears open to the real clang of Truth.

A lot of people who are drawn towards openings, awakenings or forced to look at deep recesses of their psyche through trauma, disaster, deaths and an inner force to survive great trials of life DO become ‘better’ people.

Do start thinking about the environment. Do learn about food chains. Do take more care and reverence with the earth. Do teach what they are learning about the human condition and start to see the world more collectively instead of the relentless pursuit of the individual cause for happiness (or transcendence).

However, identifying as spiritual doesn’t equate to being embodied, being holistically well, having great skin, wearing natural fabrics, drinking cacao, doing your recycling, speaking in non violent communication, being of use to your community and kind to your grandparents. These are some of the trendier aspects of spiritual scenes that can be benefits of self-actualising and therefore being more self-aware. Or they are trends or side quests that one gets curious about when there’s a pull towards eco-systemic, meaningful living and less prioritisation of activities that numb, suppress, cause inflammation and suffering.

You can be the most gently spoken, mystical, spiritually connected person and still be an arsehole. Or turn up in the Epstein files like Deepak Chopra. It depends on what soul and spirituality means to you and what your personality is up to when it’s off the meditation cushion and out in the wild aka ‘normal life’.

(I am now Googling every single male spiritual teacher (and rapper) before engaging in their content to see if there’s history of sexual abuse trials or allegations. Thus is the world.)

I have had to face inner beliefs that because I’m on a spiritual path I’m therefore good and important. That I am inherently of use to this world because ‘I believe’.

Now I feel my spirituality is more grounded. I feel less identified with needing to belong to a particular culture or subset on the outside. I’m not parking my belonging in ‘being spiritual’.

This actually helps me feel more connected to the God of my understanding.

I feel more humble to the human experience. More quiet in my spirituality and less needing to look or be a certain way on the outside to demonstrate my inner experience.

I believe totally in the soul: that we are all connected to an inner force or essence and that connects us to the fabric of life.

I don’t care what that looks like for each person.

I’m more interested in HOW you move, what you long for, what touches your heart, how you contribute to a better world, not WHAT you identify with.

Fast-forward

I’m on a plane to New Zealand. I have flown around the world on the PM’s plane but this is the most exhilarating flight of my life. I’m about to shed many layers. I know no one and have no job lined up. I imagine I should be worried but I am ecstatically excited.

Fast-forward

I have a full life in NZ. I am a government strategist and yoga teacher. I have been promoted 3 times in 4 years. I make more than double my London salary. I resign and leave my beloved French housemates. I’m experiencing a wild awakening and move to a spiritual school.

Fast-forward

I’m in London working as an erotic practitioner. I have seen over 600 clients including men, women and couples. I have spent years studying somatics, trauma and esoteric spirituality. I’m living in Sicily with my partner and dog.

Fast-forward

I am at my kitchen table, writing this.

I have claimed myself fully as a writer. I have been mentoring, facilitating and guiding people into who they really are for years now. I am single. I am fulfilled, at peace with my life and proud of the woman I have become.

There is no linear path.

No outer determinator of ‘success’.

If you have ambition, drive, will and a desire to meet the mystery of life with its potential for extreme beauty and hard-earned lessons...

You ultimately become,

More of you.

I am really not a spontaneous person. But I do take action when I feel the irrevocable call of soul.

I am currently refining where impulse meets intuition, which I imagine will be a life long study that I keep sharpening my witch’s talons on.

Every moment above led to huge changes in my life. Some were outrageous - like building a life on the other side of the world where I met the people I had been looking for my whole life. Some were very fucking challenging. And all have grown me up for market like a fatted Instagram calf.

I am so grateful for the fire in my belly that calls me into deeper connection with my core nature. The pulse of spirit in me that wasn’t happy feeling far away from myself and unseen through the gaze of others. I often knew I was acting a certain way and therefore people thought that was me… But on the inside, I knew that the real me didn’t talk like that, behave like that, hide myself and try and be cool like that.

I knew I had to expose myself to myself.

Now I am more refined in where I let my soul drag me. I have a closer watch on the incendiary call of spirit which can be extremely catalytic and crisis-inducing. I have said yes to a lot, in the name of what? Evolution, expansion, initiation? Mostly love.

I’m currently in the fallow period of an epic personal journey odyssey. My fields are lying in wait as new seeds start to poke their creative, curious and somewhat cautious heads into the climate crisis world.

With all of this under my belt… Really, I'm just getting started.

Pesticides, chemicals and soil run-off enter rivers and find their way to oceans.

Coastal waters fill with silt and sediment. The water gets murkier. The seabed struggles to breathe and plants, kelp, sea creatures and reefs begin to die off.

This is one example of how the natural world is inextricably impacted by factors knocking on its front door, unannounced and uninvited.

Humans, disconnected and disillusioned, sit in blue-lit bedrooms.

Neural pathways seek reward from short-burst scrolling and sensationalism. Thumbs won’t stop flicking even though it’s bedtime.

It feels less scary to consume than create.

And it’s confirmation bias again for dinner.

Bodies forget how good it feels to move in all directions with no purpose.

Loneliness arrives. Desire for the next hit rises.

The world feels simultaneously smaller and scarier.

We are eco-sexual creatures primed for connection, creativity, habit-forming and world-building.

As wildfires tear across the UK and Europe the last bastion of denial falls.

The outer is the inner.

The bone-dry soil reflects the bitterness of polarised hearts and the brittleness of bodies that couldn’t slow down.

Despite all we ‘know’...

The chase, the race, the plight for THE THING has continued.

The big break

Going viral

Finding the ‘one’

The 78 figure launch

The perfect body

The spiritual teacher

Hard and fast pleasure

The person who will stop you feeling your fear

This crusade for expansion, reaching, striving, pushing, seeking, dare I say manifesting - pours petrol on the fire. Not a hot, passionate, glorious fire that licks itself anew but a dangerous, incendiary fire.

Fire that reveals dust-dry earth, shallow living and shatters an illusion of synergy.

Our dominant over-culture is patriarchal and hyper masculine. It presides on yang dominance and getting the highest dose and heftiest price from an exchange of resources.

This pervades all aspects of society from the global elites to AI tech hubs in Texan deserts, the immediacy of the next all-important plastic item from Amazon Prime and the way porn overuse and dopamine-driven behaviours drastically impacts sexuality and connection.

Toxic masculine culture is power OVER not, power WITH. A hard and fast ride to the end with maximum gain.

Pushing, striving, reaching, seeking, taking and using our bodies and resources to beyond burn out and depletion has left us with land so dry it is easily scorched and bodies often numb, disconnected and starved of touch and nourishment.

We are ecosystemic creatures. We are a product of everything we eat, ingest, receive and metabolise.

We need healthy yin, synergy, cohesion and balance in our lives.

We need to restore, replenish, regenerate and live in reciprocity just as much as we need healthy fire, passion, activation, drive and action.

Wild fire can leave us feeling like nothing is left. The land is scarred and barren. Burnt out bodies are exhausted and don't feel as much. But we can come back to balance.

The earth will find its ways to grow new shoots and with the right social and environmental factors, we can too.

Our human experience is one great microcosm of everything happening, all at once. The question is, can we meet that? Feel that? Adjust and synergise with that?

The inner is the outer.

Intimacy with Life

Over 3+months I guide men into deeper connection with their bodies, sexuality and pleasure through self-inquiry, building somatic awareness and new pleasure pathways. Clients often reflect that they are transformed by the process: feeling more alive, sensual and soft. Life starts to feel richer, more meaningful and more passionate. If it was challenges that led them to me in the first place, they often dissipate due to feeling more connected to self, sex and all of life.

If my writing sparks something in you, reach out for a connection call.

Daily living, in love with me.

Eating four eggs a day.

Reading widely.

Too much screen time.

Judgmental self talk from time to time.

Ninja like commitment to being GOOD.

Not a good girl.

A Spice Girl,

Wannabe -

Excellent at my craft. Holistically well. Spiritually satiated. A spectrum of friends who reflect different elements of me. Creating, wildly, mostly. Less pissing around on Canva.

Yoga Nidra on my Shakti mat.

Weeding.

Trying to be.

I refuse to buy into the belief my fertile years are sliding off the cliff.

I am not waiting for someone to save me.

I am selling you what you already have but I must articulate the key.

Over analysing.

Marketing.

The wrong kind of yapping exacerbates a sense of purpose atrophy.

I am leading my life. No one will make it happen except for me.

Wondering what else 50k on self development could have got me?

Still being a short tempered bish with my mum. Feel bad and genuinely sorry.

I’d rather not bother, than drink shit coffee.

All my veg is grown down the road.

I slather jojoba and castor oil all over my body.

My dog is my best company and I don’t give a F if that makes me look lonely.

I’m so healthy I can’t even eat a croissant or chocolate without getting a spot.

I ain’t Steven Bartlett, don’t hate on me.

I love myself more than ever.

Expanding to meet vastly more and more pleasure.

I accept true self love is a daily choice. But something has grounded deep, ancient deep, within me.

I never realised the volume of the voice in my head. Self criticism that rung like tinnitus.

Finally I answered:

‘Yes, what?

It’s just me.’

As young girls ages 12-14 go viral for posting their morning and evening skin routines to stave off ageing….

What are those of us older women to do?

Keep succumbing to the desperate attempt not to age and defy gravity by keeping our bodies pert and our souls neatly boxed?

The post menopausal years are ideally when you completely give yourself to way showing and hormonally no longer give a F. But things are shifting so radically. So fast.

The beauty standards we’ve been sold are designed to keep us in chains by people who mostly are white men.

And it’s honestly not easy. We are spoon fed outer expectations of beauty prior to being conscious of it.

I was completely unaware of how cruel and unkind the voice in my head was about my body, my face, my skin, my teeth until I started to expose myself to myself. The voice that spoke of my purpose, whether I’m achieving or succeeding was just as loud and equally as vitriolic.

I don’t believe I’m unique here. Or ‘wounded’ or traumatised and that’s why I am insecure. I’m just a human being alive in a world that expects something shiny and perfect. That sits apart from what is juicy, messy, ugly, shameful, sinful, fecund, feral, wonky, dimpled, freckled and ultimately more real.

If you sat in my garden with me you’d see my wrinkles.

If you were on the beach with me you’d see my farmer’s tan.

I look my age and so I should. I spent 6 years in the Southern hemisphere holding my chin to the sun on long mountain walks. If my melanin had a voice it would have been marching on the picket line asking for some shade between the ages of 13 - 22 when I thought I should be tanned and blonde like everyone else. It would have thanked me for the hats later on. But the deed was done…

And I really just love to feel my face warmed like flat stones on a beach.

My body is fit, strong and athletic. And just like Cameron Diaz in the Sweetest Thing when she lifts up her arms - 'boobs at 22, arms up and they perk up, boobs at 28, arms down…. You get the idea.

Bodies change and I try to be kind. Sometimes I feel sad that future loves of mine won’t see my breasts in the heyday of my twenties but a woman’s body will never be carved into glass. Its beauty is as changing as the tides.

Despite my conditioning, I want to defy the bullshit that’s leaked into the next generation’s sense of self like microplastics.

As women when we will say enough?

As parents of daughters, how to celebrate their MAGNIFICENCE for simply being alive?

Children respond to what they are modelled and feel, not what they are told.

As I expose myself more on social media I feel the ever encroaching edge of meeting myself through the screen. Witnessing when I look tired, feel self judgemental, wish I was better at making the lighting good and producing myself into more magnetism.

I am absolutely not beyond self criticism. I know so few women who are.

But there’s a rebel spirit in me. A part that stands erect and tall and is willing to be more of what I wish to see: more and more women breaking out of tight little corset of thorns that modern day beauty standards are.

I see us standing bare breasted, with grey-streaked hairs, wrinkled eyes, children hanging off bodies, arms strong from carrying the weight of what our mother’s weren’t allowed to feel, skin weathered by the storms of life and of the elements, faces tilted to hear the call of our ancestors on the wind…

Millennia of women, holding our middle fingers high.

Bellowing: ‘we want to be free’.

I believe passionately in supporting men and couples to feel resourced and vital inside of relationship. This supports individuals to thrive and couples to fully live the love that drew them together in the first place, finding new pathways back to each other when life creates stretch in the connection.

Below is the second episode about fatherhood and the first in a podcast mini series where I chat to men about their experiences of being a father and the process of becoming the next version of self in the process.

Miroslav Bardovic is a Speaker, Speaker Trainer and Entrepreneur. He is married to the business badass Victoria Bardovic and they have a son together whilst running their businesses and travelling all over the world for speaking engagements.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I especially love our musings on purpose. So many people (including me in the past) have chased an outside purpose thinking that a job, accolade, financial goal or career stage change will make them feel purposeful. Often it can do.

But I repeatedly hear that striving for purpose outside of self collapses when a man becomes a father. Some men begin to experience purpose akin to many women who have birthed children. They accept and surrender to purpose as a lived experience instead of a goal to reach for. Purpose becomes an energetic frequency that hums away inside of a life devoted to a completely new expression of wild, primal, domestic love. An understanding of purpose which is far more intrinsically accepted and understood for and amongst women.

Many men long to be fathers and prioritise making that happen. And I personally believe that fatherhood is the initiation some men are unconsciously yearning for. Increasingly men are becoming fathers well into their late forties and early fifties. The expression of ‘freedom’ understood as financial access, unlimited travel, dating, relating and pursuit of career and whatever feels most important gets prioritised and a fear of ‘sacrifice’ hangs out in cultural narratives. Women don’t have this luxury of unlimited time to decide.

Without the rites of passage that used to shepherd a man into his adulthood, the Saturn return period (an astrological transit that happens around 27-31) can be a key moment of awakening into the adult soul expression if someone is to choose to meet it consciously. There is incredible pressure on the self in this transit to find meaning and purpose in life.

The Uranus Opposition which happens around age 42 is another catalytic astrological transit which puts pressure on the self to break out of chains of inauthentic living and finally start to carve the path they truly desire. This time of life can also be understood as the ‘middle passage’ or more commonly understood as mid-life crisis territory where sports cars are purchased, affairs are conducted and increasingly… people are ‘waking up’ and choosing a truer calling for themselves, their families and their life path.

However when someone is already very aligned with their purpose, authentic self expression and has a grasp on what they sense their soul is here to experience in this life, being called into fatherhood and the innate feminine chaos of conception, pregnancy and birth can be a shocking revelation.

It’s no secret that having a baby is a multi-dimensional embodiment experience for men too. Life starts to essentialise. Unprocessed emotional material from childhood rises to the surface to be felt and moved through. A woman changes forever through the process of becoming a mother and that requires new patterns, dynamics and relational behaviours to come online in the relationship.

On meeting their child for the first time, a father’s heart is cracked wider than ever before and their relationship to the world shifts on its axis.

A lot of my work centres around supporting men to feel nourished, vital, connected to their heart and their sexuality. This is so they can fully live as truly alive and experience all of life has to offer. This also supports a deeper range and capacity to be present with (or create) family and experience pleasure, joy and creativity. These are foundational aspects of the human condition, that for some men, are priceless when compared to the pursuit of power or professional capital.

If you’re a man reading or listening to this, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Listen here:

She said:

‘Today, everyone is hot and nothing is erotic.’

‘The face is separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul, and all of this is happening in front of us, on our phones, in the most banal ways, everyday’.

She was talking about how a small proportion of people (including celebrities, Instagram & Tik Tok moguls, beauty influencers, Hollywood culture) are sculpting the desire for what faces and bodies should look like for people en masse.

Increasingly, modern women look to the big names (and butts) of the Kardashians to amend their faces accordingly. And this is really just the beginning… Numbers of women UNDER 19 years old getting botox rose by 75% between 2019-2022.

All this is terrifying -

And it got me thinking about eroticism.

Eroticism is the pulsing tang of what it is to be human.

In our hyper-sexualised culture this can be seen as skin, flesh and the standard idea of penetrative sex.

Some would say that porn is erotic. Hot sex is erotic. Saucy fantasies, unspoken desires and fetishes can all be erotic.

But we are eco-sexual, eco-systemic creatures completely defined and moulded by our environment.

So also, and incredibly -

Nature is erotic. As is feeling the wind on skin. Rivers rushing over you. Living in rhythm with the natural world. Eating bright and fresh. Where your senses meet the seasons and erupt your ancestry.

Thick dark silty olive oil bought from a kind sun-kissed face with wrinkles. Drizzled on salted meat and peaches.

Excellent mood lighting. Soft fabrics and velvet.

Candles burning pools of hot wax. Antique candlesticks from a market that meant something.

A look across a room. Seeing new eyes. Clocking the body, figure, shape and back of the head that just started new worlds turning.

Rapt attention to the hum of the present moment.

Breastfeeding. Child birth. Watching your woman’s skin stretch as she grows your child. Her primal roar when it arrives.

One thick black coffee with stonefruit. Eaten hungrily in the sun.

Picking flowers. Wiping muddy hands on buttocks through jeans and feeling whole.

The smell of your lover’s skin in the morning.

Art that expands the mind and makes the sex centre thrum.

Eloquence and articulation with precision not pretence.

Hearty meals grown by loving hands. Eaten slowly at an old oak table with friends who care.

Your soft and curious hands tracing, massaging, squeezing your soul through your flesh.

All of this is erotic, too.

I’m always trying to wrap form and words around the intangible feeling of soul. If you have hung out in this Substack long enough, you’ll know these are the topics that Witch Child chews on. I’m asking the questions: how do we meet the world as beautiful, magnificent and initiatory? How do we fully enjoy the ride of life, stay centred within self and be made more whole by the process of loving and becoming?

I interviewed Buster Rådvik who is a Psychotherapist, Psychologist, Facilitator and Coach, based in Berlin, on his experience of becoming a father.

In new parenthood Buster began to share open writings about his journey of becoming a father on Facebook. I was so touched by his humility, vulnerability and honest words from the front line of new parenting and the process of fully choosing to become a Dad. I love how he talks with such depth, rawness and straight-up no BS about his experiences.

As a trauma therapist Buster is able to articulate highly nuanced and incredibly human information about the initiation of parenthood. I believe it is so supportive for men (and all parents) to have context for what can happen on an emotional, ancestral and physical level when we say yes to a baby entering our lives.

Women have the in-built opportunity to prepare on an emotional, physical and spiritual level through the gestation period. For men, especially men with no prior experience of self inquiry or moving through times of transition with adequate support or guidance from someone outside of the partnership, a different kind of support is required. I hope Buster’s words provide some context from the male experience.

And of course, regardless of all the qualifications and inner work someone may have done, there is an inevitable need to befriend self-doubt, challenge, tiredness, stretching relational dynamics and the feelings of being under-resourced that sit alongside the profundity of having your heart exploded outside of yourself for the first time.

As I talk about in the podcast, I have worked 1:1 with hundreds of men in somatic bodywork and intimacy mentorship. Men of all ages and stages of life have shared their needs, desires and challenges with me. Many have spoken about how much they adore being a father and love their family. And some feel that providing for a family system and focussing so much on their children, work and obligations of modern life for years (sometimes 30-40 years!) have left them feeling under-resourced and longing for more vitality and connection with themselves. Many long for a sense of freedom and more intimacy, pleasure and connection with their partner.

I agree with Buster when he says that over-reliance on individuality and the nuclear family structure is a big problem. With the obligations of modern life, many parents are juggling too much alone and it can really fray the edges of an intimate, fulfilling, nourishing and alive partnership.

I am also particularly touched by the men in my life who speak so openly about how becoming a father has been the purpose they were always looking for. That their hearts have been stretched beyond any previously anticipated capacity and as Buster says - if you let it bring you to your knees, it will take you home.

I hope this is a resource for anyone embarking on parenting, deep in the trenches, out the other side or simply curious. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a man/men in your life.

Buster is a Psychotherapist, Psychologist, Facilitator & Coach. He is also the founder of the Path of Relating and Embodied Intimacy. You can find all of his work here.

I am re-launching my mentorship for men called Intimacy with Life. Over 3+months I guide men into deeper connection with their bodies, sexuality and pleasure through self-inquiry, building somatic awareness and new pleasure pathways. Clients often reflect that they are transformed by the process: feeling more alive, sensual and soft. Life starts to feel richer, more meaningful and more passionate. If it was challenges that led them to me in the first place, they often dissipate due to feeling more connected to self, sex and all of life.

Whatever body you’re in, I hope you gain something from this podcast.

Whatever body you’re in, I hope you gain something from these writings.

In a hyper-sexualised world, where everything oozes sex to sell, people are having less sex.

Research shows young people are engaging in sex and relationships less than ever, as well as declining frequency of sex among co-habiting partners and long-term relationships. Less people are engaging in romantic relationships in general. Less booze is being drunk (so less one night stands?!) and the economy’s a shit show which adds a lot of stress. Our phones charging beneath our pillows is what keeps more and more of us warm at night.

The woes of our ever-blue-lit world are relevant because we are ecosystemic, primal creatures. The widespread longing for greater intimacy, nourishing and enlivening sexual connection and to feel more at home in one’s skin is a collective issue. If the environment is off, so are we and vice versa.

If you’re someone reading this and feeling a pit of grey sludge forming in your stomach because you want more sexual, erotic and sensual intimacy in your life (either with your partner, yourself or others) then you are not alone. And rest assured, there are very real, tangible, easily applicable ways to pull a fallen star from the cosmos, right up to the bedroom window.

I spent years as a Tantric practitioner and bodyworker. I have spent thousands of hours with men in Temple spaces where a mixture of soft lighting, loving touch and my capacity to listen to what’s really happening for someone (often beyond words) allowed me to wander secret hallways of the male psyche around sexuality and intimacy. My male mentorship clients are most commonly men seeking a level of sensuality, softness and a feeling of embodied aliveness that their upbringing and modern life has not yet afforded them.

I guide embodiment immersions and rituals for women and couples and witness what intense obligations most people are currently under and how this can create kinks in our bodies and impact the capacity to feel supple, sensual and available. Many people in mid-life are caring for elderly parents and navigating rites of passage such as birth, menopause and 2020s parenting without an instruction manual, trustworthy government or buoyant healthcare system.

Our current anxiety-inducing world requires a level of personal maintenance that is impacting people’s capacity for connection that includes spontaneity, safety, depth and pleasure.

I facilitate events and retreats where people often feel drawn because they are craving authentic connection with likeminded people. Within half a day of embodiment, gentle touch practices and shared group safety, the group nervous system starts to unwind itself. Tenderness, softness and an almighty exhale rings through the space.

I also studied History and Politics at university and worked in government for nearly 10 years as an advisor, strategist and assistant to one of the most influential men in British politics. I know a thing or two about reading between the lines of collective themes and narratives.

I have the eyes of a mystic, the intuition of a witch, energetic tentacles like an octopus and watch people like a writer.

And I’m a woman, so I just know some things.

There is a collective yearning for greater intimacy in long-term relationships and those who are single. I also believe people want to fall in love with their own flesh and find home inside self over ‘other’. They just might not know it yet.

Like all good complex sociopolitical human topics, there is nuance.

I see people who are living full and busy lives with careers, homes and holidays. They often feel incredibly fulfilled by the joy of family, love their long-term partner and want to make it work. They want more intimacy with ‘their person’. I always shed a few secret tears in my couples sessions because I am so moved by the emanation of love and their commitment to union.

For all the research about declining relationality, I also witness people of all ages wanting build robust and beautiful lives with someone/s and heal from traumas and heartbreaks that create relational scar tissue. I see people wanting to love more fully.

We’re in a time of great sexual and collective awakening. More than ever, there is unbridled access to sexology, coaching, counselling, therapy, retreats and Tantra is becoming less something ‘weird people’ do and more understood as a path to awakening many sense they need. Yet, this time of change is also one of intense upheaval and uncertainty, where the greatest collective shadows around power, sexuality, capitalism and patriarchy are playing out in the global arena for us all to see, feel and repost Andrew Tate memes about.

On an individual level, these shadows also hang out in dimly lit corners of homes and the internet. Healthy desire for love and connection can also walk hand in hand with bitterness, resentment, sadness and longing. These less comfortable bedfellows arrive when many months or years pass without communication of true desire, addressing unmet needs or a deep-seated reticence to upset someone or rock the boat.

We are not educated on intimacy and relationality as young people and many do not have healthy attachment styles or bonding modelled to them. Hence in adult life, people can struggle with a lack of capacity to relate securely and coherently. This includes honest communication, an ability to read one another, feel each other, compromise, create safety, attend to one’s own oxygen mask [read nervous system and ingrained patterns, often from childhood] before blowing up when hangry, sad, frustrated, triggered, activated, exhausted or feeling emotionally unsafe.

Sometimes when great love arrives, the unprocessed material of the past comes to the fore. What is undigested can erupt over a new relationship like burst pipe because it hasn’t previously been safe to fully feel past hurt. This can include past abuse, transgressions, emotional scarring or experiences that we’re not even conscious of. Birth and menopause can also be intense portals into feeling the unfelt as a woman goes through an enormous spiritual, emotional and physical rite of passage which in ancient matriarchal cultures would have been honoured far more ceremonially and with more reverence than now. Becoming a parent for any body can invite a level of processing of childhood and ancestral patterns which shocks people. Listen to a podcast exploring becoming a father here.

So this is the ‘intimacy scene’. And it’s not all a mess. It’s the complexity of a human existence, where people bring themselves together in some form or constellation to create love and build lives greater than the sum of their parts. I find it incredibly beautiful. I feel inspired by these topics because I know how simple changes in connection to self, other and sexuality can make an enormous difference to our entire lives.

Enter, passion!

When the sexual spark in relationship has fizzled out like a crumpled fag in a late night ashtray and someone’s true desire to live and love fully has dimmed, it’s often because passion exited the stage long ago...

I’m not just talking about the red hot desire that zips through your genitals in your early twenties and in the beginning stages of relating. Passion is an outpouring of our inherent life-force. Feeling passionate is a barometer of our access to creativity, feeling of aliveness, vitality, curiosity and our zest for life. It allows us to ride uncertainty of the best kind. Passion is what drives you when there’s no money to be made. When you are alone and fall into timelessness. Passion is what makes you, you. And often what makes you fascinating, cute and/or endearingly dorky to another.

Passion can fall away in times of hardship, intensity and stretch because we become focussed on other things: survival, care responsibilities, the promotion, living for the weekend…The next drink. It’s very common for libido to decommission in times of stress.

Life happens. There are times when celibacy or intimacy of a different kind is totally the accurate, supportive and healing choice. Birth, miscarriage, abortion, death, divorce and all of life sometimes requires us to become intimate with self again first before meeting another. Physical and emotional trauma can numb sensation in our tissue and send us far away from our sense of self. And our genitals can carry ancient stories of shame and suppression.

However for some people - many who I am walking this path with - they are anchored somewhere inside of themselves where although libido may rise and fall, and sex and intimacy may get centred or de-centred depending on life, they have an unshakeable sense of self, sex and sensuality.

Passion - that desire to create and live a full life - is often the very thing that drives the seekers and searchers. The ones that stripped, did or do sex work, the spoken word poets, artists and visionaries who paint life by their own canvas. Creativity may ebb. But they don’t run out of passion. Eroticism just lives in these people.

Here passion is different from ambition, it’s not about a goal. It’s a way of living in connection with life. This is something I personally experience: a gentle undercurrent that I can turn towards and up the voltage when I desire. As one friend said to me: ‘I’m just juicy’.

If you want in on this, it’s not a magic pill you can buy nor is it something you can only find in sex clubs or ashrams. It comes through dedicated self-inquiry, a willingness to be at home in your own skin and explore the terrain of your own flesh, bones and inner wiring.

If intimacy in all its forms has dimmed, bring passion back into your life through your personal desire to read, dance, write, create, run, craft, surf. Cultivating an inner flame of aliveness through passion for things we uniquely love (not what we want to do with our partner/s or think they should be doing) is good for the soul. And incredibly attractive.

People who are alive with a sense of purpose, physical wellness and vitality are magnetic. They are choosing to be present and attentive to their human experience, to fully drink the honey of life and enjoy their time on earth. Being rooted, in connection with land, self and sex ripples out into all aspects of life. And it’s hot.

If you feel uncomfortably seen by this piece - or annoyed at life or at me - perhaps say yes to your special, weird, wonderful thing.

Notice what starts to trickle through your body.

Let passion soak into your soul.

I guarantee, you will feel more alive.

We get to speak with authority about what something was or wasn’t because we fully had the experience. We followed the thread of who we are becoming all the way through from the great upheaval of new consciousness to a different gravitational reality.

We can feel it when someone has made this shift, even if you can’t put your finger on it. We can feel when something has fully landed.

It feels different. Denser but not heavier. More power. Internal authority. It’s like an arty film that says less with more and doesn’t leave you feeling confused with dry popcorn mouth. It’s a steak that you can taste has been fully tenderised, left to soak in high quality olive oil and salt that melts away on the tongue, cooked to perfection and left to sit.

There’s a marination.

And you’re all the better for it.

Do you know someone who has talked for decades about their divorce for example and at this point they just sound bitter and resentful? It hasn’t been digested. There’s a loop. You hear the same story again and again for 20+years and it seems to be eating away at this person’s soul like termites.

And that’s okay. Not everything may be alchemised or integrated in this lifetime. Some things are too raw, too painful, too intense or too fizzing with the firework of resistance, pain, avoidance or suffering to even go there. Some things do take a lifetime to process. Some things are a gaping wound that may never heal. And that’s okay.

But if you don’t want to be this person who loops and chastises and makes everyone else wrong for your life experiences, it’s important to just acknowledge that.

Say it with me:

I want to move on.

I want to be free.

There is a clunk that comes when an experience rewires you from the inside out. If you let it. If you open yourself to the pain of not knowing and the new layers of consciousness that arrive like newborn chicks in migration.

You will walk a little taller because you have been forced to consult parts of the self that hadn’t tasted sunlight and didn’t have vocabulary. Parts that would rather smash an abacus around forever than learn the Instagram algorithm.

In this world of hyper-fast content creation and rapid fire emotional processing, it can be tempting to speak from the present moment epiphanies. To wrap them into carousels and Canva tiles and tell the world the latest message from the therapy gods.

I’m not saying one has to pilgrimage to the ends of integration before you can ever talk about anything. I want the messy humanity of life. I want people to hold up their hands and say ‘I’m right in it, I can’t see the trees and I really don’t know’. I also want to read the poems of the people who processed through their art and made sense by writing their way through the thick of it all. Hello this Substack.

And, increasingly I’m so turned on by the gravitational pull of a woman (it’s usually a woman) who has digested enough karma, relational experience, samsara and transformational bla bla to stand in a 2026 witch’s version of an Ivory Tower (usually an oak desk with hand-picked flowers, ceremonial cacao and unstructured linen outfits) and speak from the depths of an embodied soul.

There is a gentle tremble in someone who really got ‘got’ by life. Yet if you allow it to fully take you, and shape you like stones and rocks and pebbles that are caressed and changed by the water before they meet the sea.

It is inevitable: you will be made more by the process.

Don’t let life break you into bitterness or collapse. Or at least not forever. Let life forge you into the next version of yourself.

Come up for air with your little gold crystal flecks in hand. And say to the world: I have things to say.

Yes -

I suppose I do.

I have things to say.

Then, make a Canva carousel.

I am a writer, mentor and facilitator. My mentorship is fundamentally about the process of becoming yourself and living the change in a way that feels sustainable and grounded. If you want to radically expand your sense of self and inhabit more of your body, heart and soul then consider my mentorship containers. My expertise is in the realms of intimacy, relationships, sexuality, creative expression and self-leadership.

‘I like your dog’ one boy shouts at me.

I let my dog range over and say hello. The boy recoils. Then starts to laugh. ‘Man, I love dogs’ he says and leans in for a stroke. But he jumps. He is visibly scared and I pull the dog away. His friends are laughing. He shirks it off. He’s laughing too but his body betrays his bravado.

One guy smacks another over the head with a pizza box and it makes a loud cracking sound. A whip-like sound that shocks me. He laughs. Another boy squares up in defence: ‘Hey, don’t do that’. Some titter. The hitter stands taller.

They’re not kids but not yet men.

I walk on and the ribbing, chatting and sparring continues. It has the feel of play. Play that’s close friends with pain.

There’s love and friendship. And feelings that are getting hurt and getting covered up. Sensitive souls are hardening under each push and need to prove.

I’m at the edge of the car park when I hear a genuine fight starting. One boy shouts ‘come here and say that to my face’.

‘Your Mum.’

Oh - I think. Here we are.

‘Your Mum’ is still the most inflammatory insult in the game.

Boys that jest and play and poke too hard become men that struggle to soften.

Young boys are told to: ‘harden up’, ‘toughen up’, ‘look after your sisters/brother/mother’.

‘You’ll be the head of the family one day.’

Our dominant over-culture prioritises speed, efficiency and empire building over reciprocity, regeneration and respect for the Great Mother.

The need to prove, provide, be strong and all-knowing gets woven into life like dental floss in a young boy’s braces.

The Manosphere, Polarity Teachings and Trad Wives are encouraging millions of men to embody ‘hyper-masculinity’.

Yet our world is already yin deficient.

We have a toddler in the Whitehouse throwing a 10 year toxic masculinity trauma tantrum.

We can no longer un-see where the imbalances pervade our culture.

It’s no wonder so many men are starving for softness and looking for it in places where the need will never be fully met.

Men have human needs that transcend age, gender, race or religion: for touch, affection, pleasure, sensuality, joy, play, care and caresses.

Men are starving for intimacy, sensuality & slowness that comes with an ability to feel safe -

To truly soften.

Fasted for 60 days

Wore white
Abstained from mirrors
Abstained from sex
Slowly did not speak another word
And that time my hair I grew past my ankles
I slept on a mat on the floor

I swallowed a sword
I levitated
Into the basement
Confessed my sins
And was baptized in a river

Got on my knees and said, ‘Amen’

And I said, ‘I mean’
I whipped my own back
And asked for dominion at your feet
I threw myself into a volcano
I drank the blood and drank the wine
I sat alone and begged and bent at the waist for God
I crossed myself in thought
I saw the devil
I grew thickened skin on my feet
I bathed in bleach
And plugged my menses with the pages from the holy book
But still inside me coiled deep was the need to know

Are you cheating?

Are you cheating on me?

Beyoncé, Lemonade Visual Album Part 2, poetry by Warsan Shire

I rewatched the Lemonade visual album in bed late on Sunday night. A rare evening with my laptop under the sheets. Usually forbidden. I like a clean space, holy books and peaceful auric field. The souls need space to take up residency in my dreams.

Sometimes I rewatch this album when I’m feeling ferocious. Sometimes I don’t know I am feeling ferocious, until I start watching it.

Lemonade is a visual album about redemption. It’s a fantastic piece of art. It just is art, in its most essential form. It aches, it provokes. It is beauty, devastation and revelation. It riles me up nobody’s business and that’s what I want from art. I bow to fierce, talented, female artists who can look life square in the eye and say ‘I’m human too.’ Women with children, abortions and miscarriages under their belts. Rites of passage that break and re-make and sit alongside the Grammys, Platinum Records and mega mansions. Beneath the stage lights they are women who go there. They really fucking go there. They rip off their skin and make art with their teeth and get watched by camera crews of 50 people and the entire world.

I defy anyone who has known scorn, injustice and the death throes of initiatory love and infidelity to engage with this kind of album (and Lily Allen’s West End Girl) and not feel the universality of the experience of fuck you, delivered so exquisitely and artfully.

The album covers 11 chapters - Intuition - Denial - Anger - Apathy - Emptiness - Accountability - Reformation - Forgiveness - Resurrection - Hope - Redemption. And it’s not just a fuck you - it’s a multidimensional time travel through Black America, long-term love, betrayal and the primal roar that sits inside the belly of a woman who demands to know: how could you?

Most of what is known about Beyoncé and Jay Z’s lives happens through their music which is undeniably chic to me. The music exposes the ongoing affair, the miscarriages, the pregnancy, the marrying a man who reminds you of your father, intergenerational trauma and ultimately, forgiveness. But it’s not a Princess story with a happy ending. It’s dark nights in a car park. True love presiding through pain, because well… soul mates.

Whether it’s infidelity, death or else, we will all get intimate with the arc of grief and acceptance. If you truly love in this lifetime at some point you will grieve. Some people can spend a lifetime trudging through these 11 chapters and never get to redemption. Whatever happens, at some point I believe we have to choose to start living again and either exhume the skeletons in the cupboard or decide to choose love and live through it. And I know - really know - how hard this is and acknowledge how utterly impossible it may feel.

Betrayal - oof.

Betrayal is particularly painful. You get killed by your person. They who hold the knife.

I remember saying to a friend once: ‘You know, even Beyoncé got cheated on.’ And she said: ‘I honestly think about that all of the time.’

Is that sad? That we mere mortal women acknowledge that if Beyoncé gets cheated on, then if we get cheated on, then it can’t be because we’re hideous, have too much cellulite, are unsuccessful, unattractive, unloveable [insert other things here]. It must not be about us. Because Queen B herself got cheated on by the King of Brooklyn. The greatest rapper of all time chose Becky with the good hair and kept it to himself. The Queen whipping her own back at home in the castle.

Of course there’s many reasons why people are unfaithful. And who knows what really went down with Bonnie & Clyde (and who really cares). Beyoncé’s sister Solange got caught on camera punching him in a lift and that’s good enough for me.

Whether you are Beyoncé or not, there is not much that will soften that blow. To feel betrayed by the person who you’ve built a life with, who you said yes with, who swore to protect you - in whatever way you make that mean - can be devastating to the sense of self. It can erode the deepest trusts. Cause a questioning of ultimate truths. It can fuck with your instincts and the animal body that knows on some subterranean primal level, that something is awry.

In my dreams this week I have been journeying through betrayal.

In my waking hours, I’m touching the places in me that have also tried to be less of something, more of something else and ultimately less awake - for a man.

Nod in the back if you’re with me, ladies.

I dated someone years and years ago. I knew deep down he didn’t really like me. He didn’t prioritise time with me. He was generously apathetic towards me. There were moments of intrigue, lust and connection that sparked something that felt worthy of pursuing. We shared some good times and similar values. But I clung onto the moments of intimacy and gentle openings and made them mean far more than they actually did. We never had a proper conversation about being an item so technically, did he do wrong?

We had been seeing each other for a few months and had a month apart. I picked him up from the airport at his request, immediately went home and had sex, spent some time together and I vividly remember the feeling of distance. The looming presence of another woman in the sunlit dust streaming through the window. The echo of so many words unspoken.

I was feeling unsure in his presence and sensed he wanted to reconnect with his housemates. I asked him: ‘do you want me to stay?’ He replied: ‘I don’t care, like’. It wasn’t just apathy in his voice, there was irritation. I was floored. I nodded. A frozen smile on my face, gathered my things and left. Embarrassed yet breezy until I walked down the road and felt my stomach hit the concrete.

This was my era of being the coolest girl. The girl who was dating foreign and interesting (avoidant) people. I was nonchalant. I definitely didn’t mind if plans got cancelled because there was a sniff of a wave. I overpaid my way and undersold my presence. I made it all too easy to keep me at arm’s length and paid the price privately.

I pretended it hadn’t happened. Pretended I didn’t know he wasn’t interested. Pretended he hadn’t said he didn’t care whether I was there or not. Pretended it was okay I was leaving 2 hours after we’d fucked. Clothes off and onto the bed within 2 minutes of walking in the door from the airport.

A few days later, when the time came for him to tell me he wasn’t into me, I wasn’t surprised but I was embarrassed. I remember regretting leaving my bag at his house. I felt the rippling shame and humiliation of collecting it, knowing I wouldn’t see his housemates again and I had really fallen in love with them. I hadn’t made many friends in New Zealand at this time and I really loved these guys. I remember looking at my bag resting against the sofa and deciding to leave it there. I knew what was coming. Maybe I left the bag because I didn’t want to be right. I knew that in taking all my things to the pub, I would be walking straight home alone.

Lemonade begins with Intuition.

This particular experience really rocked me. It was incredibly catalytic and sent me into darkness. Far darker than what felt appropriate for the feelings I had for this person. I wasn’t in love. I was bruised and parts of myself I didn’t know were there began rising to the surface like foam on a badly poured pint.

We never consciously closed. We never apologised or chewed the fat. We just hit the awkward cut and run and I never drove past his house again. I waited until he left the country to reconnect with his housemates and life unfolded.

This connection showed me a pattern that was mercurial and smart. I abandoned myself to try and be cool and have men believe I am easy-going and therefore appealing. It was the beginning of becoming more conscious of the ways I initiate myself through love. But really, I had no idea. I just knew I was coming alive listening to podcasts about Tantra, conscious sexuality and a rapidly expanding sense of self. I was cantering towards an awakening at break-neck speed and had no control of the reins.

In the years that followed I continued to choose men unconsciously who would touch on my deepest insecurities. This is what we do. Jung said ‘the psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.’

Now I’m well versed in this, I can choose more wisely and am more mature about what I’m available for and what I genuinely feel is in service to my own becoming. I am anything but ‘cool’. I’m incredibly sensitive, madly intense and genuinely love to ravish and devour people and receive that in return. I am the soft shelled crab and the sword.

I am grateful for the experiences I’ve had and I know on a deep level, I have chosen them all. There has been betrayal in various forms. Searing disappointment. A lot of suffering. And learning, growing and blooming into the woman I am today. Honestly - there’s been times I have all but walked right up to someone and said let’s do this thing. Because I felt the pull and I trusted it. I’ve never been wrong. I’ve never been drawn to someone where there isn’t something of value to exchange. Whether I could always take responsibility and metabolise the lessons is where we enter Black Belt relating territory. Skills I’m still sharpening.

The greatest pain I’ve suffered in connection with others often comes down to unexpressed desire and an inability to communicate needs and be congruent and honest with each other. As a species, we are woefully uneducated here and I believe many men have a hard time of honestly expressing their desires for fear of judgement, being vulnerable, hurting another or actually saying yes to the primal wildness that wants (and needs) its time in the sun.

I have sold myself out many a time. Sometimes subtly, being over generous. Dimming my essence. Playing cool and nonchalant. Allowing myself to be under appreciated. Going the extra mile and regretting it when the thank you never came. Pretending I’m not as sensitive as I am. Pretending I’m not a Witch that foresaw the whole thing anyway. Sometimes experiences touched ancient feelings, electric longings and a desire to be chosen I never knew lived inside of me. I once threw my bike in a hedge in fury and shame at a love that went so sideways. I literally picked it up over my head and launched it, screaming like the Hulk, and shocked even myself. And I have had to hold the younger parts of me, howling outside in the wet grass, for the ways I let my mind dictate the pace for my body.

Now I am older, wiser and more battle-scarred, I have chosen myself in a way unlike I ever have before. I’ve learnt to stand firmly in the seat of my womb and my power. It has taken a lot to get here. Current me can pat myself on the back and say ‘well done girl, you fucking earned this’. I can now enjoy the benefits of an unshakeable connection to my own soul and sense of self.

To love so widely is such an incredible art of bravery. To open so fully is a gift for another to receive. To protect the preciousness of a bond is unwritten scripture. To love beyond wounding and shine light on the ways we hide our true selves to feel safer is radical work. To forgive is sublime and it sometimes feels like a blunt knife dragging across your tongue.

I wish I could have told younger me, that felt so devastated in betrayal, that I would get over it and be grateful. That these moments were never intended, malicious or actually as ruinous as it felt. That no one really knows what they’re doing on the merry-go-round we call adult relating. These moments were breadcrumbs drawing me closer to my own becoming. Pulling me towards the version of myself that can stand and withstand, come out stronger and make art from the open wound and feel (at least sometimes) like Beyoncé.

I love knowing my house is how I left it. I love knowing I don’t have to speak to anyone before I am ready to descend back from where I flew away to in the darkest hours. I love it when my tasteful mix of eclectic earthy mugs stay in the arrangement I put them in and my towers of books sit obediently. Poetry here. Professional referencing there. Soon to be read. Charity shop. Giveaway. Pass on. Never get read.

I tend towards aloneness. It is how I stay close to my centre. I’m the person that says ‘take your time’ when someone leaves and I mean it. I love hosting people for dinner and I love it when they leave so I can saturate in the silence that follows good chats and cackling. If I invite you, you are so welcome to stay in my space. I love to host, to treat, to cook, to make it lovely. Then kindly depart and we’ll do it again in 2-12 months.

I don’t get FOMO. I never really have done. I do remember being furious at being dragged off to my grandparents in Wales one October and missing the Halloween party ‘of the century’ and the blessed opportunity to get ‘in’ with a 9 year old boy called William. I remember the searing injustice of missing out on the much needed social standing that would have come with having a boyfriend I would never speak to or spend time with. Dreams dashed against the rocks of a half term holiday with the rain and your family. They just laughed as I sulked into my ‘Angry Dog’ burger at the pub.

Yet of course I am human - I am sad to miss things I would love to go to and opportunities to dance, move and be in ways my daily life doesn’t exactly serve on a plate. I live rurally. I crave connection. I have needs. My local area satiates so much of me with some gaping holes where fire and heat and sensationalism and pace should be.

I feel topped up and delicious in true intimacy and touch that feels safe and sensual and sensitive. I’m a woman. My body needs to ripple out on dance floors. One cannot always just dance like to Beyoncé in the car. I need moments with strangers. You know the ones. They happen about 5 times in a lifetime and are always part of the story.

I need friends who reflect me to me and I need them to be within driving distance, not always long-distance. I want to feel myself as sexy, desired, interesting and to keep stretching the muscles of being around new people without a role, mask or management.

I want to drink a lukewarm beer and regret it. Get high, put my ear plugs in, shut my eyes and lose myself. I want to feel resourced if and when I have a family. I want the right people around me. Send me spontaneous messages inviting me for coffee or a natural red wine.

I want people I can rely on, and I want them to know they can rely on me. I want to keep plunging my hands into the pits of what I think I know about the human condition and turn my prejudices to dust.

There’s a festival this weekend I want to go to because I want to meet some new people. But my close people are all away. The dog walker is busy. I don’t ask the dog trainer because he works too hard already. The girl from the cafe who is good with dogs is working all day and I can’t leave my boy for that long. I could take him. I could leave him in the car. I could try things, make arrangements, stretch the possibilities. But it’s also okay - I will miss the festival. I am surrendered to the life of a mother, and the gifts of this incredibly individualistic time of my life where co-regulation happens here right now - as I type with a dog at my feet. The snoring soundtrack that settles my system, knocks on the inside of my heart and lies in front of the little windows and doors that stand ajar in the longing for other.

There will be other festivals. There will be other opportunities for connection. There will be ways I will make things happen when the time is right to meet the eyes of new people and immediately feel:

Hello,

Friend, lover, other.

I will treat the dog to an extra long weekend walk, go to the vintage shop that is never open when I want it to be, create a pleasure plan for a client, sit in the sun, start a new book and plant out my salad beds instead.

G & F if you read this in time, make some nice new friends and introduce me.

I’m wondering where this tug towards community keeps coming from.

I have strong Aquarius placements in my astrological birth chart. The signature of Aquarius is to be humanitarian, community focussed, big thinking and blue sky picturing. The water-bearer is air in nature. Innovative.

Aquarians are driven by large scale social missions. Loaded with progressive intellect and sharp authority, sitting alongside detachment and aloofness.

I dance an interesting tango between hatred and fascination of social norms and culture. A circus line between absorption and condescension of modernity, being totally in love with the human condition, a maddening desire to know and read and think and feel and help everyone and a whim as strong as thick black coffee to cut loose, live in a tower of books and be completely independent of it all.

But of course I cannot be defined by this. BECAUSE I AM UNDEFINABLE, I AM AQUARIUS!

Don’t box me in.

That’s for the Cancerians.

I increasingly surprise myself with this constant tussle, pull, dissection and desire to create community.

I want it for myself. Like I said, a woman has needs.

We used to bleed in red tents together. A woman never walked alone. She birthed with her mother in law and shared her life far beyond the edges of what we do today. Now those that share do it more through the algorithm and less through skin to skin births, deaths and bleeds together.

I also want community for others. Not from a place of trying to fix the lonely. But to answer this incredibly obvious call I hear in the streets - in the circles - the calls - the intake forms - the words - the hearts - and mostly in the things that are not uttered - the bodies that betray a lack of touch and trust - the eyes that fail to meet pupil to pupil, instead trailing to the side in a way that says… see me.

I want to gather the people who refuse to calcify into the two children, two parents, dog and neat little driveway dream that is expanding expectations on relationships far beyond the capability of two human beings to adequately hold.

I want the people who - despite everything - on some level really want to be seen and felt by people to meet each other. I want to create a space where people who want to have their stories shared can do so. To welcome in those who are willing to risk judgement, the curtain twitching of neighbours and feeling vulnerable, to meet the kind of people that will really see them. Who will befriend them. At best love them. At the very least, sip tea alongside them.

In my daily life I have little buzzes of chats here and there. It’s not like my voice is going hoarse. I have my dog, my dog trainer, my family, my local friends, my clients and the people in the village I have started gently avoiding with a quick turn down a country lane or overly interested look into a parked car.

I have friends all over the world and I feel seen and met. I chat with the ladies in the veg shop. The ones that are up for it at least.

I hug one of my favourite women in the village who runs the local cafe everyday that it is open. It’s a proper cuddle. A proper arms wide open - I’m coming from the kitchen and putting down the focaccia to properly hug you and make sure you have a coffee on me - kind of cuddle. Sometimes I walk my dog half an hour to the cafe, down country lanes and past streams, just so we both get a dose in between coffee orders and online sessions.

The men in the butcher ask me about my dog. One of their daughters is marrying a Sicilian and we laugh about the fire.

At least one person a day stops me to say hello to my dog. He draws in so much more attention than I would ever garner alone because he is so overtly friendly and happy. I’m more of a resting bitch face kind of gal.

I’ve been told by strangers many a time to ‘cheer up love, might never ‘appen’. Through many methods and means, I’ve softened. My pelvis, jaw and vagus nerve are more supple, soft and toned. My face is gentler and I get this less. But I’m not someone that gets approached. I never have been. I’m not a puller-inner. I magnetise in a different way and repel with equal measure, I’m sure. So, these little doses and moments of connection, they help me tick along.

But I keep coming back to this longing to gather people together.

I like to hold spaces where people can learn something about themselves and receive a hit of what I have to offer. And I genuinely want people to meet other people. And crucially, I don’t have to be involved.

I’m not trying to build a friend army. I don’t want more WhatsApp groups to respond to or coffee dates to keep rescheduling. I want to offer people a place to find what they’re looking for inside of themselves and this most powerfully happens alongside other people. I want people to meet THEIR people. To find their tribe. To connect with new ideas and new lovers and create manifestations of human clunky, sweet and beautiful sexiness that ripple out into something so much bigger and more important than me.

Community has become a buzzword. An antidote to the longing for belonging so many of us quietly ache with. Community can be something that we are sold as a side dish of endless ‘healing’. And it can be the meat and potatoes of a life that really just needs intimacy, connection, holding, reflection, love, time with real life human beings and a place to put down roots - even if for a short time.

In the Western world at least, we are individualistic. Obsessed with materiality. Many of us are rightly sceptical of shared culture and very sceptical of people gathering around one loud booming voice from the pulpit like moths to the dangerous flame of hierarchy and unspoken power dynamics. We let our elders wither away in care homes. We don’t speak on public transport. We are face down, eyes cast. We are faith averse, cynical, independent and right wing patriotism rises like yeasty bread whilst national pride fizzles out like streaks of drunken lads’ piss on a bonfire at 5 am.

Community has come out of the church and into the Telegram groups. Community is on offer as part of nearly every event, offering, festival, curriculum, local art class and social justice network. Online communities vary in complexity and efficiency and I imagine most people are far too overstimulated and stretched to use them effectively.

I know the feeling of community far more than the framework.

Community is where you can be yourself. Where you don’t have to actually like everyone because it’s not the point. It’s not a message group and you won’t plan a villa holiday with everyone’s partners and complicated plus one arrangements. Community includes people who will drop soup off when you’re ill. Who will recommend books you might like and ideally not get offended when they never get read. Community includes people who will be there when you have a complicated birth and need something that is not a card and bunch of gaudy flowers. Community is not blood family, although it can be. Not friends, although it may be. Community is people who share the same dreams, ambitions and will probably drive you insane in a shared decision-making process. Community is people who will change your tyre, take your children to school and build a relationship with them out of the goodness of their heart. Community is people of all ages, sizes and races who will go the long way home to drop something off that you need. People who will invite you along even if it’s awkward because you feeling welcome is more important than whether there’s technically a seat at the table. Community can be no strings attached but also requires one crucial ingredient:

That you show up.

That you keep showing up.

That you don’t cancel the plans and wait for a brighter day. That you don’t stay quiet, stay silent and hope someone will create life for you.

Community is there for the taking. It’s easy to forget what hasn’t been modelled but community lives in our bones because we’ve had the sense of tribal belonging encoded in us far longer than the fears of failure, weirdness, loneliness or over-scheduling.

Communing is as old as time. The options for where are endless. Follow your nose, your heart, your desire. May you wind up exactly where you’re supposed to be and feel awkward, welcome, grateful, nourished and extend the hand to call someone else - in.

If you are you in the South West of the UK and want to join my monthly connection circle where we explore themes of self connection and community, please message me.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59 - Rainer Maria Rilke - translated by Joanna Macy

-
I write of the world and our place in it. I write of the challenges of being a human. I write of my human ails and pains. Little trite white woman, am I.

You may sense my apathy, my self-indulgence, my hatred of modernity and the ways we conspire against our better selves because it’s easier, smoother and numbs us against the horror of it all.

The world soul says hit me with just a little more canola oil. Gimme that good dopamine, that scroll again again again. Check his new partner. See if she’s better than you. See, I told you she would be thinner, more successful, more followers. Don’t ask me if they convert. It’s the outside that matters. The world soul says just a smidge more processed sugar. Pile it high, let me snort it on a white mirror. I wanna feel like a rockstar in Primark pyjamas and flammable slippers. Give me just another toke on the toxic dynamic that keeps me spiralling in and in and in because it feels so good to want and be wanted even if the knife is serrated and the hooks are rusting. The world soul begs bend me over and feed me disillusion, fear, scarcity and a resistance to voting. Dress me up in women’s clothes, tell me feminists weren’t helpful. Give me a spanking at the ballot box and stuff that white paper and black cross right down my free aching mouth. The world soul screams tie me up, don’t hold back. We are getting near the edge. The world soul bellows there is so much talk of tragedy, of the new world coming, you forget to be right here —

In the longing.

The world soul does not scream for devastation. Or does it? I don’t know. I’m not the world soul. I don’t direct dial the divine. I just have me and my life and my existence but I harbour the belief, deep in the belly of my bones, that we are connected to something.

We are communing. We are communicating. We are fornicating with a disruptive edge of disillusionment of what has been lost. Where we are going. The deliciousness of what has been experienced. What the world can be.

Collectively people feel a lack of agency. Not all people. Some people. Collectively people feel stuck, scared, angry and point fingers at people with different coloured skin. Not all people. Some people. Collectively women are terrified of men. Not all women. Some women. 68 million hits on a website teaching men how to rape their wives. Not all men. Some men. Collectively young people don’t go out anymore. Saddled with debt. Don’t have sex anymore. Collectively people behave behind the screen like they would never dare in public.

Collectively, collectively, collectively.

I hear people’s stories. Individual stories. Not all the stories. Because I only have two ears and a small following. But I have had my hands on over 600 men and I have listened a lot in my life. I watched the human experience from cafes and my hidden spots on social media. I have read lots of books. I don’t know how many but at least 50 books a year for most of my adult life. When people talk I listen to the words but I am watching for that flicker. The soul behind the eyes and the code running their hearts.

The stories come in directly. Straight into my ears. Missiles to my heart.

I’m curious. Considered. I make wild claims and see the world in themes. I’m empathetic. Sometimes apathetic.

What I hear is longing -

Incredible suffering, dressed up as longing.

Boredom, uncertainty, feeling checked out and touch starved, unmotivated and creatively constipated.

We can diagnose it: trauma, functional freeze, dissociation, burnout, empty tanks, cold hearts, open wounds, ruptures unrepaired, secrets unshared. We can get out our white coats and round glasses and poke and prod and put on scrubs. Suck, cut, dissect and suture the potential of a better human existence back together - together - together.

There’s always the possibility and allure of looking out there.

Out there — for the answers, the questions, the salvation.

Out there lives the longing.

Out there lives the desire.

Out there lives the potential.

I suggest we should turn itself on itself. Get inside the longing. Climb inside it like Leonardo DiCaprio with the bear in the weird film I haven’t seen. Make love to the longing. Let the potential of possibility break you.

It’s pleasure and pain. It’s grief and ecstasy. It’s the moment when your heart is shattering and you think you’ll die but you start laughing because it’s all so tragic and pathetic. It’s alive. The suffering, it has legs. It gives off heat. It reminds us that we actually feel and we really want things. And it’s okay to want things. It’s a requirement to reach for things. Let it thaw your freeze. Blow on the ashes of your dreams and watch them burn again.

I’ve spent so many years in longing and felt like that will bring me home. But I was looking outside - at the longing out through the window. I was wishing and hoping for a better world. I tried so hard, I got disillusioned and superior and tagged out of the game.

I forgot that the way I live is in the longing. I have to inhabit it to feel whole. I have to feel the ache of yearning to feel alive. Not because I am a glutton for punishment but because life lives there. Longing creates belonging. It forces us up off the sofa and into the arms of potentiality. It whispers to us like a dead relative in a medicine journey: ‘fucking get up off your arse and make it happen’. Or however your Granny speaks to you.

Longing is a response to the cry of life that wants you here, right now. Present and totally incorrect. Fucking up and failing. Trying things out and doing the ‘no one has a clue about anything dance’ that humans have been trying to perfect for always.

Maybe it’s true, that we are being dealt a cataclysmic hand by the universe so we rally the troops, save the rainforest, create ecosystemic communities and save the planet from excitation and human self obsession.

Whatever is afoot, we are being invited to get closer to that which makes us truly live. To burn up like a flame. To know life by its seriousness and have a good fucking time on earth.

Why not have a life that includes the kind of sex people wrote rock songs about. Why should it be you, to avoid the kind of grief that initiates true change? Why not love hard enough you shatter yourself whole.

We all have a choice to step away from the high intensity - sugar fuelled - candy crush existence of modernity and get up close and personal with the sacred. Sniff the armpits of the moment. Suck in that funky soul that lives in dance floors, old pubs, new lovers and songs that melt you on the highways. The endless drive of -

Your. One. Life.

This evening I opened my laptop to start writing, because annoyingly I seem to flow best at night even though I like to be in bed with a memoir by 10 pm of a Saturday evening. Because I’m 34 and there’s no time like the present.

-

I don’t want to market niche events on social media. There are a few reasons for this:

A) There are a very small number of people who follow me who are local enough to come.

B) Instagram does not work well for small local events.

C) I live fairly rurally therefore, people really need to want to come. I have found them managing childcare, busy lives, rising fuel costs and atrocious public transport PLUS driving 40 minutes down country lanes caused people to hedge their bets a lot and pull out last minute over the winter. It was disheartening for everyone involved.

D) Facebook was good for events and now is dead. 90% of my feed is mad dog people shouting about how rude other dog owners are or rescue centres all over the country trying to farm out 18 month-year of German Shepherds because the average family is absolutely ill-equipped to house a dog made for protection and genuine work.

E) I am sick of making content that gets so little traction. I don’t want to up my game and start filming myself opening a parcel or getting ready for bed to get the algorithm wet for a 2 hour soulful connection circle. (I am willing to make more effort for other work - but not this).

I tried for 9 months to build community around my events in Cornwall online and despite an initial burst of interest, great feedback and an obvious desire I feel I am meeting, talking about niche local events for 10-12 people online has felt like death by a thousand paper cuts.

However, I have had an inordinate number of people engage with this Instagram story. Many people have commented saying ‘YES’ and told me they would like to come. This tells me there is life behind this idea of taking marketing OFFLINE and into the stratosphere of trust, hazy communication, an inability to know who is coming and whether these people will actually do the bank transfer, all predicated on the archaic principle of: ‘the word of mouth’.

There could be a number of reasons for why sitting in someone’s living room instead of a rented space would appeal. Such reasons could also range from navel gazing self reflection about where I am at physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually or simply that collectively online we are all sick to the back teeth of offerings.

It’s no longer a jungle. It’s a marketplace out there. People are selling their wares and have been for years. Nebulous spiritual offerings used to fly on whimsy, magnetism and the promise of something because it was new, alluring, exciting. A generation was waking up! There was breathwork, cacao, sound baths, grief circles, sharing circles, naked yoga, non-violent communication, things with contact, things in yurts, things with less clothes, things with sliding scales and come as you ares…

Now all of the above can and does happen in a sauna.

And, the people are cynical. The people are tired. Some are broke. Many are stretched. The people of this world of self made soul-based pussy witch light worker code cracker new world builder priestess priestex witch wizard shamanic drum fiddler embodiment finger wagger [insert archetype in bio here] are they themselves - them most of all - are tired of it all.

I feel a collective ‘meh’ happening.

Some people are talking about this change loudly, and that helps them define themselves as a leader in the field of aforementioned business. And I can’t know for sure, but I sense and my sources tell me, that normal people with normal jobs and a healthy appetite for sitting in circle and communing with the sacred are also a bit burnt out by it all.

I’m taking the piss a lot here. I don’t mean to be cynical and trite.

I sense something else wanting to break through. Something happening offline perhaps. With or without a sauna. And in myself, most of all.

I feel an enormous collective rumble sitting beneath a huge freeze. Playing dress up in apathy, fear, resistance, contraction and insecurity.

Our world is unfathomable. The content is outrageous. We are swimming in the mire of our own unbecoming. We are chomping at the bit for the new. But it’s absolutely not here yet.

It’s fantastic there is so much goodness out there. I celebrate hugely that more people are talking, sharing, learning, growing, becoming self-led, self-employed, self-responsible, self-sourcing.

Self indulgent?

Yes to the parents breaking down generational trauma patterns. Yes to the Dads with their babies strapped to them on dance floors. Yes to the women headlining festivals who are gorgeous geniuses bored of ‘having to yap on about how horribly I am treated because of my body’ (The Irish singer, CMAT). Yes to the increase in awareness. Yes to better mental health service provision. Yes to the care for humanity. Yes to the marches, the dances, the decision to create for the sake of it and not because people are watching/paying/scrolling/praying.

There is so much goodness out there.

So much fantastic, articulate, smart and well thought through content about the state of the world and our place in it.

And, it’s just a lot isn’t it.

It’s just a lot.

So maybe people want the simplicity of a sitting room.

I could talk about how ‘transformational’ the practices are (they actually are, as I’ll borrow lots from Soft Core and that really does what it says on the tin). I could talk about how good it feels to be seen. How lovely and satiating it is to be in bodies with other people. I could even wheel my dog out for a few strokes. I’ll make tea. I’ll probably light the fire. I could add testimonials from people who’ve come to my events and said nice things. I could add my credentials. I could find ways to visually and thoughtfully demonstrate how I have dedicated my life to such things over the last 5 years and that I’m actually very good at ‘holding space’. I care. I’m trauma informed. I’m this, I’m that. I’m anywhere in between —

But honestly.

If you’re coming to my house, I’ll just be myself.

It’s probably me that’ll need to worry far more about whether the space is ‘safe’.

I’ll offer exactly what I feel is appropriate. I trust my intuition and read of the room implicitly. I’ll vet people in my own way. I’ll be rigorous but not obviously so. I’ll be discreet. Kind. Open. Curious. I’ll share what I really want. Because it’s people in my living room. Because where we are at collectively requires authenticity. Not as a #vulnerableshare but as a living, breathing experience of someone’s realness.

No one is getting away with it anymore. The gloves are off in the global meltdown. We are knee deep in bullshit, glamour, celebrity culture, electric white veneers, fads and microplastics. We are being cognitively fried by our choices.

So, if hell is in the handcart and you don’t know where to look.

Look for what’s real -

What is true, achievable, accessible, interesting and genuinely good for the soul.

You might find it in a sitting room in a rural village.

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We have forgotten we used to ‘knock on’ for each other.

We used to go down the ‘rec’ to see who was about. We used to meet up in low slung jeans and little jackets and walk around the local town with tiny handbags eating fat thick chips, with salt and vinegar. We would walk across the fields to the post office to buy one sugary drink and 1p fizzy sweets and sit on bird poo stained benches and see if the boys were out.

We would leave weird notes on people’s cars, enveloped in some imaginary game where we are spies and adults find that kind of thing funny. We would pick blackberries, make blackberry pies and try and flog them around the village for 1 pound each.

We knocked on people’s doors and ran away and hung down by the river for hours and hours because summers were endless and our parents knew we were safe. We would resurrect Robin Hood’s forest town and pretend to be gypsies, vagabonds and thieves. Or maybe Kevin Costner and Maid Marian when puberty waltzed on in.

We would drag someone’s sofa out to the river and make a camp and sit there just because. Pretty much anyone was welcome. We were rude to each other but it wasn’t bullying. Mostly loving and we were too young for ‘banter’. We existed in an endless attempt of trying to be cool but it wasn’t insidious - not really - because there were no screens, no cameras. We didn’t know we were being ‘present’, we just were. Long days out were far more about self abandon than absorption.

In later days we spent hours on Friday afternoons straightening our hair in the school mirrors. The main event: the catwalk across town en masse, school skirts rolled up and Charlie Red body spray silently leaking into our skin. Disrupting our hormones. I never liked but it was £1 a can and all the coolest girls wore it. I had a perfume in a tin box from House of Fraser. Felt sophisticated, high grade.

We would spill into and out of Subway for 4 hours with 40 other people, block the whole high street and then walk to the park, share four cans of warm Fosters, play dizzy dinosaurs and pretend we’re drunk until the parents rolled up and we’d go home, wear tiger print pyjamas, forget that the game was ‘attempt to get kissed, get chosen, thus get cool’ and fall asleep into our innocence again.

We would make plans on the school bus and stick to them. We rarely sent more than a text in between. Even when MSN arrived and we got glued to instant messaging, the Sims and geriatric dial up tones, there was none of this ‘oh i’m not feeling it, I need to tend to my nervous system / honour my bleed for 17 days / descend into my feelings for 48 hours / enact modern self care by doing do nothing / scroll on social media until my eyes go numb’. There was definitely no ‘bed rot’ unless you genuinely had the flu and even then most mums would kick you out into the playground after 3 days horizontal. We made a plan, we showed up. Just in time for the bus to town.

We have forgotten that we phoned each other via the land line and we knew each other’s parents and they knew us. Recall how your parents were actually always right about everyone? Especially the lonely kids, whose parents weren’t around enough. They always hurt my feelings the most. I wish an adult had told me: ‘she's bullying you because she lost her Dad’. All the parents had eyes for the naughty kids, the nastier ones and the ones that got you out the window and down the dirt track until that hallowed stomp of a furious woman in her dressing gown and a faint torch light had you stuck like a rabbit: fuck. Parents also had eyes for the parents that didn’t have eyes.

In the generations of people who that span 25 - 60 years old right now, life has changed so much.

Of course, life has changed so much for everyone: the local forests don’t look the same, the pubs have lost their soul: gentrified like the fruit and veg shops and high streets turned into gambling allies or yet another inane candle shop that surely can’t make any money?

Covid kids are anxious as fuck and university leavers have forgotten they never had a freshers week because young people aren’t drinking anyway. They also aren’t having sex. They’re sitting at home, isolated, worrying about the future whilst Greta Thunberg gets ridiculed by the leader of the free world.

But for those of us who grew up on estates, in suburbs and like me, who would walk across fields for one rebellious can of coke at the corner shop or to ask the resident 18 year old to get us the Malibu for house parties with bonfires and anonymous snogging, this isolated life is so so strange.

I see so few children ‘playing out’ in my village.

Where are all the kids sucking lollies, on skateboards and wasting time?

I know there are ‘youths’ and ‘ruffians’ loping about causing trouble all over the country, bored and stuck in the winding estates and crumbling mews’ that is the British class system. There are 25% of children not in school right now. I watched the TV series Adolescence, I know how terrifying it must be to raise a teenager with the weight of this world upon them.

But right here, where I can see:

I see young families on the beach, I see endless offerings and events for mums and families but I see no young, sweet geeks or wannabe cool kids lolling about.

I see very few children running free. And they should be. I live in a safe place, a more wild place than the usual. A place of beaches, benches, icecreams and corner shops.

There should be mini skirts and tiny tops in October. I should see too much make up and terrible flirting. I miss the noxious tang of 13 year old boy aftershave and Cornish pasties and diet cokes in the square.

We’re being sent indoors en masse. Fear of safety. Cost of living. Helicopter parenting. Crumbling school systems. Inadequate out of hours care. More cars on the roads, less freedom to roam. And those phones, in every young pocket sucking them into themselves.

We mirror what we see.

Being young and bored and poor sucks and it can lead to trouble. Crime. Falling in with the wrong crowd. Loss of options. Fear of ostracisation. But springtime fun and skateboarding, surely kids need this?

Young people need to stretch their edges. It’s a right of feminine passage to freeze your ovaries because the bellybutton must be out. Kids need to learn to roam, outside of the gaze of their parents. To attempt to be cool to remember who they really are in the moments of inevitable awkwardness and nights of silent self reflection.

For us, weird Boomer / Millennials, it’s also weird. We are the generations that genuinely knew what it was to save up for a new bike. Who had piggy banks and the clay pots you smash to get your coppers out.

We didn’t grow up with mass convenience or mobile phones. We reluctantly helped our parents in the garden. We hung about without a plan. We were born without the internet. Now we spend most of our waking hours working, socialising or wasting time through it.

Next time you arrive somewhere with friends, count how long it takes for someone to ask for the wifi. It is usually seconds.

Who are your friends who don’t have social media? Usually they are the last bastion of wild or have enough self awareness about their addictive patterns it’s just better not to.

Who are your friends who don’t document social occasions? Who can stay present through a long evening on the sofa without checking their phone Who spends time in nature, regularly? As in actually walks in something that is not a tarmac path in their local park or sits under a tree just because?

I’m not trying to shame us…

But to acknowledge the bellowing gap between where we were and where we are.

I suppose where I’m trying to get to is a nebulous point about community. About time spent unoptimised. Plans made unscheduled.

When I left London friends were making polls to see when we were next available for dinner. Average time, a Thursday between 6-8 pm, 2 months ahead. There was 5 of us in the thread.

Now, I live simply. I don’t make lots of plans in advance. I choose quality connection over quantity. I obviously don’t fuck around like my teenage self. I’m discerning, I’m productive. But I value community still.

I want house parties, impromptu bbqs and spontaneous invitations for coffees, chats, beaches and wine.

I would never have called my ‘crew’ from my childhood and teens ‘community’. I don’t think I used that word until a few years ago.

I’m an Aquarius, deeply disliking of society but weirdly obsessed with people and loving of the human condition. I don’t want to live ‘in community’. People are far too annoying and things left to rust in the garden makes me feel stressed.

However, I value community bonds and kinship incredibly.

I believe our generation has fallen into incredible self obsession and individualisation.

I get it, life is hard. Times are tough. Unstable. Unpredictable. Financially tight. But I don’t want us to forget that ‘community’ isn’t something that you put in a values statement on Instagram. That ‘finding your tribe’ doesn’t have to be about Telegram threads attached to online courses.

We are the generation that didn’t have to like everyone to include them at the river. We made allowances for the weird stoners, the guy that always smelt and the kind shy nerds that mirrored ourselves back to ourselves.

Living somewhere is not just about skimming what you want from a place on the surface. Drinking the best coffee in town without bonding with the barista. Creating human connection is so much easier and more simple with a smile and it’s becoming so radical to connect with strangers, people often look like you’re deranged.

Plough on - be deranged.

Maybe drag your sofa outside this summer and see what happens. Let’s show our children that life exists beyond the screen. That the broad wave of human beings are truly decent people and yes, their frowns are hard-set: they’re just trying to get by. Endless days can still feel gloriously endless because they are filled with possibility and not mind-numbingly blue lit.

I don’t wish I was a teenager again. I love being in my thirties. I feel the possibility of this time. I don’t herald the past, I’m glad we move forward but I’m shouting here: the silent killers, they have us. They wreak more havoc than we’ll know.

And as someone who can’t wait to plant my own veggie patch and does favours for people who ask them of me, I encourage you to put down your phone. Make a plan and stick to it. Show up at the bus stop. Write a letter. Risk rejection. Forage something you can eat from your local hedgerow. Try not to see giving time to someone as taking something away from yourself. Make life more simple.

Feel that presence of possibility - of youth, or presence, not pretence. Again.

Maybe somewhere deep down I didn’t actually feel worthy of the things I have received and the joy I’m allowed to feel.

There are various ways I’ve bought more pleasure into my life. Some of it therapeutic, spiritual, shamanic, ritualistic. Some of it focussed, targeted.

There was a time when I realised: there is a load of unprocessed emotional material and beliefs about myself and my sexuality coming up in my relationship which I have never fully addressed but now it’s here and I have to look at this big obvious bright red burning fearsome thing now.

So I made pleasure a priority:

I took courses on self pleasure, unwound guilt about my privilege, took a hammer to the belief that I’m not good enough, sexy enough, erotic enough, beautiful enough. Some of this was obvious and some unwound incredibly subtly through ways I didn’t plan or expect.

Moving away from London and actually just enjoying my life more than my work had a big impact on my felt sense that life can AND SHOULD feel good. Then I collapsed the two - work and life - into just my life where I also work.

And now my life is my work which is my work which is my life.

I exist with a felt sense of soul purpose, like I’m here for something and my ‘professional’ and personal choices reflect that.

I have spent years building my capacity to meet a deeper version of me everyday. It’s often hard and causes emotional upheaval, and it also allows me to sink into deeper states of rest, knowing, pleasure and joy than I have since I was a child.

And of course, experiencing high-calibre erotic and sexual connections will certainly crack you open into deeper levels of pleasure because once you’ve had the gourmet, there’s no going back to the ‘all inclusive buffet’.

I truly believe people who do not experience good sex do not experience pleasure-filled lives in very simple ways because the general bar of connection, intimacy and pleasure is low, eros is running pretty dry and this is a catch 22: more pleasure means more pleasure means more pleasure means more pleasure.

Well fucked people do not start wars, lead toxic lives or dump their rubbish in rivers and streams. They’re too busy enjoying their coffee slowly, adding the extra glug of silty olive oil to the already slutty pasta, watching the magnolia blossom fall to the grass and lighting candles just because it warms the space.

Unlike we are led to believe by the demon-hunters: pleasure is not just about sex. And you are not a whore if you are a woman who enjoys her erotic nature.

Welcoming more pleasure into your life will ripple through into your sex life. Sex is the micro of the macro. Your sex reflects your life. So pleasure, in all its forms brings more joy, more love, more embodiment, more generosity, more space, more somatic body-based awareness and connection and more presence into your life. Newsflash: this is good for sex.

But as I said, pleasure isn’t about sex…

Enjoying a life of simple pleasure is revolutionary right now. Tending to your garden, burning incense, collecting local herbs and flowers, sipping your tea slowly, sitting in ceremony, taking long walks away from concrete. These are free and exquisite.

Breathing slowly and not trying to make anything happen is becoming a prerequisite for being a calm and capable human being.

Choosing to enjoy your life in ways that are sweet and free is the perfect way to stick two fingers up to the current regime that has us believing that harder and faster is better. (Again, not about sex…)

I believe collectively there is a resistance to actually enjoying ourselves. Interwoven with Catholic guilt, Protestant work ethic, 24/7 news cycles about how the West has fucked it up all supports this insidious belief that feeling good in our lives is somehow unfair and wrong.

In fact - ‘life can really be that beautiful’.

BUT -

This isn’t hedonism. This isn’t ‘quit your job and drink 14 pints’. Pleasure isn’t about saying yes to things to be gluttonous, greedy or to just have the things you want because you want them (HS Tikkytokky). We’re seeing too much of this extractive self obsession in our culture and it’s fucking us up. No more ‘I deserve this at the expense of the other’. Pleasure is not about having your Amazon package delivered tomorrow so that endless plastic items will make your life more convenient. Pleasure is not always driving instead of walking. It’s not the quick fixes or cutting corners. It’s not a self indulgence that screams ‘I am a child on the inside’.

Pleasure is the felt sense of peace and beauty.

I have bought pots for all my plants and now they look so sweet and springlike and have improved my feeling of peace in my home. I move my rocks and altar items around and pick flowers that reflect the essence of what I am working with and calling in. I spend far too much money on quality cacao because it’s thick and delicious and I’ve started lighting a candle and sitting to drink it in silence every morning. I’m taking more time to chant and sing. I drive long distances to walk my dog on the beaches where we can be most free and he can feel most alive.

I am actually in one of the most frugal parts of my life where any additional income is going into other things: building, growing, developing, tending, caring, focussing. I don’t waste money. I don’t over-consume. But I welcome the things that matter.

I drop friends home to save them walking. I try and be generous with my time and my heart. I touch myself in loving ways. I read books that expand my mind and are raw, gritty and show me something about life - just for the hell of it. I move so much slower than I ever have but I am more productive. I am consciously choosing not to engage relationally with anyone and yet my life is incredibly rich and pleasure filled.

I get bored. I get lonely. I wish my dog was more cuddly but he just doesn’t like to be smothered, just like me. I’m not wafting around in a kaftan, lighting sage and awash with the abundance of the universe. Sometimes I feel brittle, contraction, fear and pain. I get bored of my jumpers and notice toothpaste stains far too late.

Yet there is more subtle pleasure, joy and sensation in my life because I have chosen to be more embodied. I have ‘done the work’ not to dissociate and over consume to avoid my feelings. I do my best not to fall into scrolling and wasting my precious life. I am a ninja for my own attention. My time is precious. My feelings are signals. Ultimately I have made some really heartbreaking choices over the years because I am choosing myself.

I really honestly love myself.

Spring is in the air and it’s impossible not to feel its eroticism.

If you are someone who feels bland, bored and lonely…. If you are craving touch, intimacy and the love of another person…. Go out immediately and buy yourself a plant. Tend to it and watch it grow. Buy an organic body oil that smells delicious and put your hands on your own flesh. Learn what you like. Create ritual and slow down. Go and find a tree and make friends with it. Visit it as much as you can, sit there and breathe together. Your life will improve.

You can buy a life hack book from an airport lounge or you can do something incredibly simple like start caring for yourself in softer, tender and more loving ways. Over time you will create more sensation in your skin, more sensitivity in your heart and find that simple pleasures find you -

These tiny moments of joy, devotion and blessing are a gift from God/Goddess.

They are free to you as a human being alive right now.

And they are right here, waiting for you.