Expansion

Waking Witches, Moving Home, Choosing Love

I am late on my Substack musings.

Life has been overflowing.

I am in an expansion.

One of my best friends is pregnant, and as I watch her physical belly expand, I feel the same expansion happening in my own spirit, in my own body.

Expansion is not comfortable.

Kind of like when I first started freediving. I had to do a lot of training in order to extend my lung capacity enough to eventually hold my breath for five minutes, without passing out.

The ribcage must be pliable; there requires a certain level of stretch in order to hold more. This stretch can also show up in love, in finances, in building a team for your business, in meeting the world on fire and not collapsing under the weight of emotions it brings up in our system.

It is no accident that alongside my ability to be stretchy and tensile, I also needed to be strong; to have the bones and muscle required to hold the stretch. Weightlifting has offered that for me. Drinking mineral-rich infusions for over 5 years has nourished the density of my bones.

My core is rock solid.

My spine, straight.

My back, supported.

All of it in service of one thing:

For my belly to be soft.

For my heart to be open.

I moved into a new home this week.

It’s the first time I’ve officially moved into a new space in six years.

There were bursts of travel here and there, but my little apartment in the city of Cape Town became, in so many ways, my nest.
My literal sanctuary.
A space that tended to me, as I tended to it.

It held me after I left my engagement and home in New York.
It became the container from which I birthed my work as a women’s mentor.
My very first program, Woman Awake, was created in this space.

I hid there when the epidemic of fear took over our world.
But rather than collapse, those times called me to action.

I trained in my little lockdown bedroom.
I became vocal online, speaking clearly, fiercely.
I never thought too much about it, I just did it.

My process was shared with the world, messily.

Yet slowly but surely, I found my voice.

There were many nights I sat on my balcony, looking out at the trees ahead of me,
rollie in hand, the sky pitch dark.

I wailed to the moon like a baby not yet ready to leave her cocoon.
I begged for her guidance.
And many times, forgiveness.

One day I put up a wind chime, and I swear its song carried through the entire block, calling the birds and the bees to me — literally.

(We actually found a bee’s nest in the tree in front of my balcony that the caretaker had been harvesting wild honey from.)

I knew I needed to leave this space eventually, but the timing never felt right.

I was caught in the inbetween - longing for home, a family, a partner to do it all with,
And yet equally this deep, unwavering satisfaction in my own independence.

The comfort of a space I had come to know so well.

I liked being able to pack up and go. There was an ease to living so light. I knew I could rent this city apartment in a heartbeat and pack my bags, get myself on the first flight out.

But as time ticked on and my muscles grew strong, my nervous system began to find a new rhythm; one no longer shaped by a childhood trauma response that said go, go, go, but instead a quiet invitation that whispered, how about staying?
How about going deeper rather than further?

And so of course, after one full year of devoting to staying, I entered this year with an invitation from two dear sisters to move into a home. An opportunity to make the dream come true, but this time with women, with the sisterhood.

Reflecting back on it now there was not much time to overthink it. A home became available, a temple you could say, and my body quite simply said yes.

My body said yes to the momentum to move.

To move into community.

And let me tell you, the move came with fear.

A lot of it.

Everything I had just earned from a recent program needed to go straight into the deposit. I spent weeks navigating leases, contracts, banking logistics, piecing it all together so we could bring the vision to life.

At every stumbling block, though, at every moment we could have backed out,
we chose to stay. We committed. We went down to the ocean, close to the home we longed for, and we prayed.

We gave our offerings.

Roses and moon blood, tobacco and prayer ties.

And without much preparation, we vowed to one another to do it.

To trust.

There is nothing quite like the alignment of three women with one shared vision. I’ve always known the power of three. This time, I got to experience it. I got to lean into the trust I’ve cultivated over years of working with women. Years of listening to the body and knowing the difference between fear and the necessary discomfort of expansion. To actually lean in, and lean on, my sisters.

My women.

And so the time has come.

And now, we are officially moved in!

The home is ours for the foreseeable future.

I wake to a serene scene of stillness and water. So much water.
There is something about waking and sleeping beside the vast sea —
to have a view that is unlimited, uninhibited.

To watch the spectacular colours of the sun as he peeks his red, round face above the horizon, bidding us farewell and welcoming us with each new day.

My view of the world feels infinite.
It offers a literal experience of boundless possibility, a sense of potential that truly lifts my frequency and expands my belief in what is possible.

A peace has settled into my nervous system since landing here, so deep it almost feels too good to be true.

The guilt, at first, was real.

I told a friend recently that it feels almost illegal to live this well.

What I’ve come to learn in these days of landing is how to expand my capacity for deservingness.

Not as entitlement, but as a quiet truth.

A deeper knowing beneath the discomfort that says,

Yes. This gets to be true for you.

Lean back, love.

Receive all that you have poured out,

Trust in the overflow.

The day before I left my apartment block, the building caretaker, who is now a dear friend, and honestly one of the reasons it became so hard to leave, offered to clean my car. His son had essentially been living between my place and his, and over the years, we’d become like family.

He wanted me to ride off with a sense of freshness.

A clean slate.

(My car was still filthy from festival madness, and I graciously accepted).

But the next morning, as I walked to my parked car, under the trees I’d looked out onto from my little balcony for all those years, I was shocked to see my car completely covered. All around and on top of my little Hyundai were white blossoms. It looked as if I’d been snowed under, but curiously, it was just my car that had been covered.

My first instinct was frustration, oh fuck, my car was just cleaned. But as I stepped a little closer and looked up at the trees above me, it struck me that actually, they were saying goodbye.

My whole heart burst at that moment and I cried like a baby, right there in the parking lot. I cannot quite put into words the very visceral sensation of truth that had hit me. This knowing that as hard as it was to leave, I was being sent off with blossoms, with support from the more than human realms that I had spent so many mornings and evenings greeting and paying gratitude to.

My balcony is known in the building as the place the birds come to visit, and sometimes even come to die. It is a wild piece of inner city concrete, with wind chimes and plants spilling over like an untamed jungle. The trees had become my friends, they watched over me as I wept, and they watched over me as I made love under the starry skies. They witnessed me in my crushing heart breaks and prayed with me when I had lost my way.

Of course they knew I was leaving,

Of course they needed me to know too.

I am currently deep in the initiation journey I am holding called Radical Woman, where we are spiralling with The Witch archetype and the unfolding has been my most nourishing container yet. Something that often gets asked of me in these spaces is how do you know you are a witch, or rather, how can I become one?

To me, there is no becoming or knowing, there is simply a trust, a being-ness. A decision to stay connected to the true nature that is nature. Our very nature as humans, and the nature we get to come into connection with day in and day out. A witch is a woman who is unafraid of her spiritual power. A woman who understands herself as part of all that is, dark and light. You do not need to do some fancy training or take some exotic plant medicine to awaken your connection to these realms. All it takes is paying attention to what lives right in front of you, and believing there to be something living – and something paying attention back to you.

A lot is being unearthed in the world right now, and I have found myself both shaken and calmly available for it. And by available, I mean there has been a deep knowing for some time that the way things have been going will eventually crumble. The centre cannot hold. And so what do I do in times like these? I allow myself to be malleable, I reach deep into my own vessel and hold more breath, more energy in motion, more e-motion. With this expanded capacity, I can then create a space around me for others to go there too, to feel what has been aching to be felt.

The grief is real.

The grief is sometimes so real it feels like it may suffocate me.

Suffocate us.

It is that same sensation at 4 minutes 40, when I feel I may just die under the water, drowning myself alive because it is just too much to hold.

It is at this precise moment that I know I need to soften. That in order to survive a little longer in my dive, my entire body must relax, must melt. I know that I have been here before. That I have trained for this exact moment. That I am so acutely alert to my edges, and that my body and spirit have been preparing for these times for far longer than I can consciously know.

This is perhaps my simple message to you. An invitation to soften. To recognise the necessity of going under the surface, to meet those depths that ask for expansion, that demand absolute attention.

We cannot bypass this moment.

We cannot look away.

– And we also cannot let it drown us.

For we have been preparing for it, in strange and peculiar ways, in ways our minds are still yet to fully comprehend.

It helps to be in the company of others who feel it too.

It helps to be around those that have chosen to be brave in their unravelling of old identities, of breaking out of the boxes they believed themselves to be trapped in.

Being close to the mother helps to.

The mother as in this living being that nourishes us so unconditionally. This Mother Earth that understands expansion, that both destroys and creates, again and again and again…

From my new home office, I look out at the ocean and meet a stillness that feels like heaven on earth, a pristine state of quiet clarity.

Other times I just see chaos – murky, wild, stinking foam; waves that want to devour and crush anyone who comes into contact with them.

I feel this energy within my own body, within my own nature. There are moments when a fierce rage rises up in me that wants to tear down and decapitate all that has ever caused harm.

It is a violent energy, an energy that seeks to reenact violence.

I know it well.

It comes out when my partner makes an unconscious comment that hits me just right — hits me in the marrow of my female ancestral invasion and causes me to want to rip his face off.

I warned the women in Radical Woman that when we come to truly know our rage, it can be quite a force to navigate, quite a current to tack.

So many women bury this energy, let it rot in their organs and flesh wondering why they live with disease and dissociation.

The Bitch in her shadow is the bitter woman trying so desperately to keep it all together, bending over backwards to be a good girl, a nice and pleasing, pretty and perfectly stripped and starved girl, moulded into the mannequin she was told she needed to be in order to keep all the shit inside and perform the role of “woman.”

The role of “woman” in a world not built for women.

As we enter the Bitch spiral on this Radical Woman initiation journey, I observe the reactive nature of this archetype too; the aspect that is eateress and devourer, the saboteur that destroys and burns all she ever tries to build to the ground.

I know her well, too.

When our rage is not harnessed for creation, it can only be used for one other thing — destruction.

And so this is why I continue to devote myself to the work I am doing. Creating spaces to bring what lives in the collective shadow back into the light. To find the treasures within the triggers and offer the gifts that live in the wounds. Only then can we stand in her true expression, which is really quite simple.

She is grace.
She is space.
She is that space - that ability to embody the very definition of wisdom.

To hold the complexity of this contradictory reality without rushing to reaction,

without being seduced by division.

Being in this new home, I can breathe into this reality more readily. When that rage rises inside of me and all I want to do is push away the love streaming toward me, I look out at the ocean and I recall her times of serenity.

It is only in that stillness that I can allow something else to arise, something softer, something a little more subtle.

A love that overwhelms my heart and breaks me open, forces me to see beyond the binary, beyond the foam and muck and dirt in front of me, peeling off my skin so I can be available to a sensation I myself can still not fully put into words.

For to be hurt is to hurt.

And to hurt is to be unwilling to face one’s own hurt.

When we are not available for our own current of sensation, not connected to the earth, not connected to the fellow humans that make the weight of the burden less lonely to carry, we seek to dump that burden elsewhere; we harm or we avoid, and at certain states of disconnection, we siphon that energy off others, off the innocent.

We are living in times where so much feeling has been buried beneath distraction.
Too busy advancing and progressing, we forget what makes life worth living.

And so I pray for those who are hurting.
I pray for those who have lost their way,
who chose hurt over healing, numbing over feeling.

I pray that they may experience this love I felt with the trees.
This connection I had with my building caretaker and his son.

I pray that they too may find the capacity to stretch into sensation—
to expand their ability to hold more energy;
more e-motion (energy in motion),
more aliveness,
more generosity.

For when we offer up our hearts,
when we choose to stay,
to connect at layers far deeper than we thought possible —
we expand a little more, and then a little more,
until that space begins to overflow into the space of others.

And in this meeting, connection is born.
Only here do we make it possible to believe in love again.

Believe in a love that, once sparked,
becomes a ripple.
And then a wave.

This is my love spark to you.

Be the ripple that starts the wave.

AM

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Gardens Sanctuary Apartment to Rent:

If you are a sister (or two) looking for an inner city sanctuary from April onwards, be in touch. This is my two bedroom, currently with one room as an office, looking for a longer-term tenant.

Airbnb Link here (I am offering local rates too) xxx

Image taken for RICHUAL RETREAT by Katinka Bester

To learn more about an upcoming delicious retreat I am co-hosting head: HERE