If Only You’d Been Nice

All my words, brain power and energy is being ploughed into my novel (which is 10,000 words longer as of the end of last week) and a brand new short story that looks like it will become a novelette. At the moment it is tenuously named The Spy’s Wooden Mistress (and what she remembers).

It’s a feminist spy story, with a side serve of Norwegian folklore (it features a huldra) as well as some serious daring-do from the archives of World War 2. Think Commandos on skis and an utterly inhospitable frozen wasteland. (The BBC’s History’s Secret Heroes is a treasure trove of real people going above and beyond during WW2!)

Today though, it’s all about my short story collection.

This week, I have for you If Only You’d Been Nice.

It is honestly a fabulous story to read aloud. I have again, been sensible and only done the first page — as per the remit of this segment.

It’s a Christmas horror story and it’s not the only one I’ve written.

There’s also Broken Angel (a story from the LMT anthology Deck the Halls, that didn’t make this collection — you can read it here though).

If Only You’d Been Nice is about the lengths one woman goes to rid herself of a housemate from hell. But often these silver bullets come with caveats we are never aware of when we wiling take what is on offer.

Such is the case for Charlotte.

The fun thing about this story is that all the transgressions of housemate-from-hell Hayley — they are all true. They were offered to me by friends on Facebook when I asked about the worst thing a housemate had ever done back when I started writing the story in 2014(ish).

If you’d like to read ahead (or read all the way to the end) you can hit the button below to access online options, including my favourite, Kobo, and Apple’s darling, iBooks.

Thanks for reading (and hopefully listening).

I hope this week is treating you very well. (My love affair with the creative boon of the Winter Year continues.)

Graceville

I sometimes think of my short story collection like I’d consider a tribe of my children. You’re not meant to have favourites. You’re meant to love them all equally.

But the truth is — I have a soft spot for several of the stories in the collection, and Graceville is one of them.

Graceville was first written back in August 2008, making it the oldest story in the collection. It was also the final story I worked on for the collection. Hitting THE END and SAVE less than an hour before my Summer Year began in September last year.

For one reason or another, Graceville never ended up properly out on submission. I think it (like the title story of the collection, which was originally published as “Blinded” in a suicide awareness anthology) it had all the bones of a really good story — I just didn’t have the writelry chops to do them justice.

Graceville is experimental. It’s told from three different perspectives, utilising first, second and third POV (point of view).

The story opens in the first person POV, with our teenage protagonist, Sarah-Jane. I kept true to the brief and didn’t give you the first page of each of the other perspectives. (It was tempting though!)

If you’d like to read ahead you can  hit the button below to take you to all the online options, including my favourite, Kobo, and Apple’s darling, iBooks.

Thanks for reading (and hopefully listening).

I hope this week is treating you very well. (I’m quite in love with this week!)

In The Words of Others

The final hurrah is in the hands of others — wiser than me with their thoughts and wisdom.

On Stories, Wounds and the Underworld

Dr Martin Shaw, Scatterlings

“For many of us, wound means truth. In a sugared world, holding your gaze to something broken, bereft, or damaged seems like the deepest position we can take. We see this way of thinking move all the way through the modern arts. It’s what gets the big grants. Myths say no, that the deepest position is the taking of that underworld information and allowing it to gestate into a lived wisdom that, by its expression, contains something generative.

The wound is part of a passage, not the end in itself. It can rattle, scream, and shout, but there has to be a tacit blessing at its core.

Many stories we are holding close right now have the scream but not the gift. It is an enormous seduction on the part of the West to suggest that jabbing your pen around in the debris of your pain is enough. It’s not. It’s a trick to keep you from doing something more useful. That’s uninitiated behaviour masquerading as wisdom. Lead is not gold, no matter how many times you shake it at the sun.”

On Working With Me and my Natal Pluto/Underworld Proclivities

Janette Dalgliesh, Life Coach and Planetary Magick Maven


“How amazing for your clients! Just by existing, you can unlock transformation in them – but in secret, from the hidden “back room” of your personal house.

And it happens in the context of 1:1 collaborative relationships that feel like a meeting of minds.

…the doorway in is like “oh here, let’s sit on the porch and have a chat about interesting things” but meanwhile the porch swing converts into a luxury monorail pod, taking them safely but inevitably into the underworld realms for a journey that might feel like death and rebirth for a moment – but eventually leads to more daylight than they knew existed.”


On the Number 7

Rebecca Scolnick, The Witch’s Book of Numbers

(7 — The Seeker) The number of spiritual journeying, divine mystery, and the esoteric is 7. It is the energy of deep questioning, careful analysis, faithful insights, meaning-making, and understanding. Answers are not promised, nor are they truly necessary, for 7 does its best work in the inquiry phase of things. The number 7 knows that the best questions lead to better questions. Its energy leads you down the rabbit hole and largely deals in the darkness, which can be experienced as devoid of life-force energy, but also as teeming with potential and fertile possibilities.

The energy of 7 can be intense and dogged … causing you to chew on the same idea for hours or repeatedly reread the same passage, waiting for the moment when the magic key unlocks the door to monumental understanding. When embodied, this energy has the potential to reveal and enlighten.

On What’s Surprising About Working with Me

Helen, Melbourne

“You’re not the bog standard tarot reader, and you’re willing to reframe super weird and wafty questions.

On The Old and New Existing Simultaneously and Repetition

Lauren Berlant, philospher

“…one of the hardest things to recognize…is that you are creating new spaces from within the old spaces without replacing them. This is the problem of the both/and:’ you don’t stop being in the world, but you also make other possibilities. And eventually those folds can become the reference if you allow them to take on some weight or if you can gather the resources with other people to make them.”


“…in order to look forward to life and have some access to objects to long for and that allow for pleasure, forms of life have to be built through repetition and return.”

On Working With Me

Carina Bissest, Author of Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations, Editor and Educator

“As an editor and educator, I’m used to helping writers move past fear of failure and other creative blocks, but when it comes to my own writing, that objectivity sometimes disappears. It was during one of those personal moments of darkness that I discovered Jodi Cleghorn and her depth work. Together we opened doors, discovered focus, and identified opportunities, all leading to a determined path to success. Her intuitive guidance leads to creative starts and self-discovery.”

On Becoming Real

Jessica Dore, Offering (28.01.24)

“Becoming real may be a practice that involves three things:slowing down enough to get clear on my wants and limits; trusting what arises through this slowing down as “accurate”; and knowing that what I want matters.”

On Working with Me

Bec, Melbourne

“Anyone ready to open themselves up to examining what they really feel and think and why, ought to see Jodi for a reading and benefit from her unique abilities and insights, delivered in her personable and empathetic style.”

On Heist Movies

Anne T. Donaghue, writing for Shondaland

“Because what I like in these heroes (or villains, whatever) are things  I’ve yet to fully embrace in myself. Heist movies, then, are a  much-needed reminder that it’s OK to be a little calculating, or to  dream big, or not to cower in the wake of confrontation. It’s OK to  reassure myself that I’m allowed to be colorful while existing in the realm of grey, and to find friends that bring out the best in me instead of those I can’t plan and plot with.

On Working With Me

Erin, Washington State

“Jodi offered gentle, probing questions which helped me understand this inner critic, giving a persona to an entity with so much influence in my life. She then offered language and imagery to dispel the narrator’s rationale and make her story’s failures evident.

I was coaxed out of the story enough to be open to challenging it, and from there shifts occurred. It is impossible to further a story I no longer believe in.”



In the classic closing words from my childhood: That’s all folks.

See you on the other side.

That Heist Vibe

Screenshot

Two weekends ago I woke with a voice clear in my head:

You need to connect to the heist

The instruction hadn’t come as part of a dream I was waking from. It had come as I was waking, as though picking the sweet spot to relay the message. It’s the first time something quite so obvious and specific has happened to me.

What the hell, I thought, as I lay there in the dark. What does my depth work have to do with a heist?

It was an odd but also kind of liberating experience to think of my depth work from this perspective.

I could see parallels when I let go. Then across the next few days I went down rabbit holes learning more about heist films.

Act One — The Preparation

Every heist movie begins with a mastermind assembling a group of people with specialised skills with the intention of pulling off a highly complex robbery.

As someone pointed out, it’s not a heist film if it’s just George Clooney or Sandra Bullock alone doing it (though The Thomas Crown Affair does successfully thwart this convention!)

So that’s us right now. I’m calling in and assembling that group. You’re heeding the call. We gather (a carrier bag word!) with unique life experience and skills we can collectively draw on to successfully navigate what comes next.

Act Two — The Execution

And what comes next is the successful execution of the plan, where the group gets what they set out to obtain: money, diamonds, priceless artwork etc.

It’s worth noting at this stage that heist films are usually inherently anti-capitalist.

So in my depth work, we go down, together, into the Underworld seeking to retrieve what was cleaved off and stolen by the patriarchy, capitalism, restrictive religions, shitty family etc.

Together, we’re successful at getting ourselves down into the Underworld, navigating and trouble-shooting the challenges that inevitably come up — because that’s the nature of an Underworld journey. But, we find what we went seeking … and more, because there’s always a few surprises along the way.

Third Act — The Aftermath

The third part of the heist movie is what happens in the wake of the successful operation. (Charlie Kunken — more on him in a moment — points out that it’s not a heist movie if they don’t get what they came for — there must be a successful robbery.)

That’s the part of the depth work where we’ve got what we sought and now we start to experiment with what it means to have that in our lives, then the slow process of integrating that into our current and future lives.

There’s usually some kind of twist too.

For us, that’s going down into the Underworld and finding something quite different than what we anticipated, followed by the unexpected ways that ripples out afterwards.

I mean, it wouldn’t be fun if we knew every single beat of our stories unfolding.

From Heists to Cancelling

Believe me, this was not where I anticipated trajectory the thinking on my depth work to go.

Doubly so when in the dead of the night, thoughts of heist movies segued into thoughts about cancel culture.

I have a theory that we can only have a successful cancel culture movement because we have been practicing a form of liberal perfectionism and policing on ourselves all our lives, canceling and hiding parts of ourselves that can’t and won’t ever fit the ideal — whatever that ideal might be.

They’re the stars of the Underworld, the ones we plan to go down and repatriate.

Enter Stage Left, Charlie Kunken (Heist Nerd)

Other than watching Ocean’s Eleven, two decades ago because I didn’t mind spending two hours watching George Clooney, I didn’t know a lot about heist movies. Then I found Charles Kunken who knows an unprecedented amount about heist movies.

Using Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid* process he identified 16 characteristics/conventions of a heist movie, then used his paternity leave to sit up late with his baby daughter and watch, as well as take detailed notes, on 32 films. I loved the comment that his daughter’s favourite movie was The Great Muppet Caper.

Looking more granular at heist movies, the similarities between the depth year and the great robberies fell to pieces.

Except I kind of loved the idea that we, as we enter our villain phase, are becoming the “bad guys” of patriarchy and capitalism. The self-proclaimed “bad girls” putting our lives ahead of what we’re told is appropriate for us — and going after what was stolen from us.

Take from that what you will.

Twelve Hours and Counting

Registrations for Unseen close at 8pm this evening, Brisbane time.


There are three core components of Unseen.

💫 monthly 1:1 session which last 90 minutes (leveraging my unique synergy of tarot, storytelling, coaching and intuitive downloads.)

💫 two group calls (2nd/4th Saturday/Friday depending on where you are in the world)

💫 weekly audio check ins via Signal.

I have one final email to send at lunch time then we can all take a deserved break (and I can thinking about returning to my post-trauma romance writing again, given I finally know what happens next).

Enjoy today’s Mercury Cazimi (a moment of startling clarity or easeful answers to crunchy problems) as well as the Venus vibe of Friday if you are in my corner of the world.

And if you’ve never seen the opening scene of Edgar Rice’s Baby Driver … let me leave that for your enjoyment. One of the best uses of music in a movie ever — and a sweet car chase (once upon a time I wanted to grow up to be a racing car driver!)

*Last year the Story Grid offered up a questionnaire that spat out the genre of the book you’d written. I punch the data in for What I Left to Forget and discovered I’d actually written a modern morality story, which once I saw it, I knew that was what it was at the heart — even though it had begun as a dark love story.

Eclipses, Power and What Holds Us Steady

A trip into the underworld will ultimately bring you up-close and personal with your relationship with power.

There are any number of definitions of power including economic, social and personal power — and also what you might find in shadow work (such as Benebell Wen’s course at the Tarot Readers Academy).

My definition of power is simple: the ability (and capacity) to effect change internally and externally.

Power, Electricity, Energy and Eclipses

I’ve been thinking a lot about power this week, as one of the analogies that comes with eclipses is the uncertain and flickering nature of energy during these portals — like living through an intense summer storm, with all the candles lined up on the bench waiting for the lights to go out. Wondering how long the power will be out if it’s lost.

And I mean, in parts of the US, the lights literally went out for four minutes as the moon covered the sun exactly.

Elsewhere, we have felt it. (As astrologer Diana Rose Harper pointed out — we are mammals and mammals have instinctual knowing and fear around these anomalies!)

For me it’s been like living in surges. Then blackouts. And if we think of electricity, of power, it gets kinda interesting (or least is does for me).

Have you felt it these past weeks?

A surge of certainty, physical energy, focus, determination and motion. Watch me fucking do all the things. I have the power!

Only to be swept in the extreme opposite direction by exhaustion, self doubt, confusion and either the freeze or flight response.

Could someone please stop messing with the current?

My head, heart, body and soul have all taken a battering. And the trauma in my bones has been rising, making it an additionally “fun” time to navigate.

(I know the moment I initiate my winter work container, my shadows are going to come roaring up. It’s one of the ways I trust the work I’m offering others, knowing it’s already shifting things in, and for, me.)

Containers

I’m a huge fan of the word container and this week I discovered Ursula K. le Guin wrote an essay called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

It’s the idea that before we had spears we had bags. A very different story is told when it is centered on a container, not a weapon.

It’s a story of life. Rather than conflict.

And I like contains because they are known and represent embodied possibility.

Containers have a known structure and edge and composition. They have space within them. But what you do with that space — well, that’s up to you.

It makes me think of my backyard pool. It’s a long, kidney shape, deep at one end and deeper at the other. It’s a known quantity. But what happens in it changes dramatically depending on who I invite over and what we decide to do once everyone gets here. (At my graduation party it was my friend’s dog who fell in!)

The pool is a tangible container.

But it’s also an anchor. Swimming is one way to calm my nervous system. To move my body when it’s too tired to move without the weightlessness that water provides

In that way the pool is both container and anchor for me.

Anchors

In times of uncertainty I have to remind myself I have anchors — non-negotiables — that position me in the world exactly where I am most comfortable and safe: with a book, and tea as the sun comes up; in my journal where I can let my erratic thoughts tumble out and maybe (maybe not?!) cohere into sense; plus there’s the people who know, love and hold me. Who know how to guide me back to my center.

Do you know what your non-negotiable anchors are?

Those rituals and practices that support you, and keep you steady in challenging and disorientating times. In the flux of change.

And the people who hold and strengthen you without needing to fix anything. Who guide you back to yourself, tweak the lens of perception you’ve warped.

I love what Esther Perel says about anchors:

The nice thing about an anchor is it is inside the water but the boat moves. You’re not stuck. You are rooted.

Last year the depth work we undertook from April to September gave us that anchor as well as always being the container.

A Different You, Seeds A Different Future

Depth work is a potent place to generate a different you, from whom new ideas, new creative projects, new business trajectories, new ways to be with clients are birthed.

You ripple in new ways and the world can’t help but respond.

Between the three of us last year, we explored our relationship with rest, nurturing and success. We dove into how our power intersected with those relationships, our fears, our desires, our core values, the stories (old and new) attached to them and our actual real world, lived experience of them.

Then as we ascended from the Underworld the three of us were all flung, in very quick succession into new external lives. My two clients both started new jobs in the same fortnight, and Kate Wildrick and I laid the foundations for Prosperity Consciousness, also in the same fortnight.

I came into a Summer Year that would not have been possible without the deep exploration, healing and reorientation that the depth work over winter gifted me.

What we explored and learned in the Underworld gave us tools for what came next. I mean, we’re always messy and imperfect, but we all felt we had new insights that guided the next six months.

It’s a relief to not be wandering lost (at least for a little bit.)

Last(ish) Call

If you’re yearning for an anchor, if you’re ready to add new/old aspects to the kaleidoscope of you, if you’re ready for something different in your professional and creative life and you’d love to be in a supportive container, Unseen offers all of that.

Doors close tomorrow afternoon and our first call is Friday/Saturday (depending on where you are in the world!)

Regardless of your interest in Unseen, comment below and let me know what your eclipse experience has been.

Being sans social media is wonderful for the quiet in my head and nervous system, but it sucks in terms of having a finger on a wider pulse of experience.

Why Winter/Depth Work Might Be For you

Just a few more days of me talking about Unseen, then I will gratefully retire the marketing words and pivot the focus to the thousands of other things I’m brimming to share with you.

Why would you consider being part of Unseen?

The speed, complexity and overwhelm of modern life doesn’t favour depth experiences.

The depth experiences available might only tiny pockets of time, asynchronous with the usual flow (or log-jam) of your life.

Gifting yourself a depth “year” is often life changing — but in gentle and incremental ways. Often in ways you can’t predict the outcome of when you begin.

Being part of Unseen will give you a depth experience (and some) by providing an anchor for six months of self inquiry and reclamation. A point to return to each week. A rich and evocative structure. And, people just like you, on the same journey.

What else can I tell you about it?

📢 Winter/depth work calls to you. (It’s like a future version of yourself is trying to get your attention to know this is the way to meet her/them.)

🐶 The idea won’t leave you alone once you know it exists (when I first learned about a depth year at the end of 2021 there was no denying diving into it).

😒 There’s a low level dissatisfaction that you can’t quite articulate the origin of. (Especially because for the most part your life looks and feels and flow, pretty well.)

💭 You want to know yourself better and need a shape and structure, plus a beginning and end point, to you keep turning up to explore. (Let someone else think out the big structural stuff so you can just do the bit that interests you, the journeying.)

🧩 A part of you is missing and you’re not sure what part is missing. (This is particularly pertinent this year, as we go into the underworld to find bits of us which has been lost/forgotten/exiled/silenced).

🦄 Meaning making and stories are your jam. (The whole container is embedded in story and we a nerds when it comes to making meaning on our own terms.)

🔮🧱You want an intersection of the energetic, spiritual, tangible and practical. (All my work is anchored in the physical, spiritual, emotional and intellectual with a heavy emphasis on things have practical application — otherwise, honestly, we are just wasting our time.)

❤️‍🔥 You’re a huge fan of my work and love the idea of six months with me. (And guess what, I am also a huge fan of you and the idea of six months with you is delightful.)

Plus — you’d love to have one of the villain era badges (because yes, everyone who signs up this year gets one.)

What you can expect

The first two months we work with Inanna — identifying and shedding.

The middle two months we with work with Persephone — seeking and reclaiming.

The final two months we work with Psyche — exploring and integrating.

There is no written content for Unseen.

The structure is flexible and adaptive.

There are weekly audio check ins via the Signal app, fortnightly group calls on Saturday morning/Friday evening.



AND … there’s just two and a bit more days to sign up and three more space available.

This Once Precious Life, One Story At A Time

There are lots of things to share, as my Winter Year structure finally forms up.

The second of my Beautiful Questions for the Year of Asking was what it meant to live seasonally. The simple answer to that was, a little of the summer year had to be in the winter year and visa versa.

That meant my Summer Year needed stillness and some inwards facing time. The good thing about summer is the long days and the early dawns offer plenty of early morning quiet time to read and have tea. Plus time in my journal.

So what does a little bit of Summer look like in Winter?

Visibility, was the simple answer. (Believe me, an eye roll followed!)

In winter I have a terrible habit of going into my cave and not coming out for six months. It’s terrible for my mental health. As much as I love inward facing time, time that’s effectively isolation is not good.

This winter year I am maintaining my quest to do something new every month, with someone I wouldn’t normally hang out with.

This meant that in the first few days of my winter year, when I was absolutely slayed from the end of the summer year list of projects — I still went out to my first ever supper club.

And guess what — it filled me right up.

Huzzah for playdates.

Business-wise I still need visibility as well.

Not to be outdone by the choice of something new each months, I decided to do the thing I will usually avoid at all costs — getting on video.

Anyone who has had a remote reading might think this is weird and strange. Or anyone who has been part of a zoom group.

Sitting talking solo to a screen though — urgh, please no. Not when it’s not part of a wider conversation.

Every Wednesday (day of Mercury) I shall record a short video of me reading the first page of one of the stories from This Once Precious Life. (My beloved legacy collection kind of of overshadowed by other things the Summer year demanded.)

I was inspired by Luke Arnold’s First Page Pajama Party. (I won’t be doing it my PJs, well I maybe — maybe not, that’s not the intention, but it will eventually be proper winter and who is to say there won’t be sleep pants further on?)

Today I recorded “It Could Be”, one of the vignettes.

These videos are intended to be rough and ready. I am struggling with the freeze reflex at the moment and the fewer steps between me and what I want to do, the better.

There’s no make up, I made a vague effort with my hair and I was vaguely articulate.

I’ll be back next Wednesday with another of these, hopefully a little better with this who video gig.

I hope you enjoy.

Into The Dark Woods

This is a perfect topic for this dark moon.

The dark woods was the affectionate name one of the 2023 winter women dubbed my winter depth work and how the summer year was like arriving in a hut surrounded by a beautiful garden.

When we caught up last weekend we all agreed our summer year had been busier than anticipated and not quite as idyllic as the concept of that glorious garden may have been.

One thing missing from all our summer years was each other. I don’t think we realised how important journeying together was.

It is time return to the dark woods. I am hoping you will join me  in Unseen for this year’s winter depth work.

The Dark Woods

I’ve been studying fairy tales with Carina Bisset since the middle of February. Her Season of the Wolf course is a rich and complex exploration of fairy tales and science.

Last week we dove into The Robber Bridegroom and Bluebeard.

Christina, my anam cara, commented that the girls in these fairy tales (and their adaptations) and so many others we have studied, are lead/coaxed/coerced/curioused into the dark woods or far-flung houses.

Often they arrive alone to find monstrous things awaiting them. Or they travel with the person who will become the perpetrator of ills at their destination.

All these locations have on thing in common — they’re isolated.

Isolation

A few weeks ago, I spoke to my friend who is a social worker, about isolation. We were talking about my novel. My friend highlighted isolation as one of the risk factors in domestic violence, and how the setting of my novel, in Western Queensland, is definitely isolated

I remember the way extreme rural living (so different from my life in the city) facilitated the kind of brainwashing my ex got away with in my mid 20’s. And how I let so many things happen, until it was a full-blown domestic violence situation, because I was repeatedly told: this is the way we do it in the country.

(Just to be clear, no, we don’t behave like that, anywhere, ever!)

For my main character, Lucy, the isolation of the far-flung township of Matilda, is meant to be a protective factor in her leaving her sanctuary in Hobart. And it is, until someone undermines the confidentiality clause of the dig she’s working on and invites the media to town.

Fairy-tale isolation means the girls are unseen and unheard. Alone they are vulnerable — not the Brené Brown good vulnerable. Here, being alone puts them at risk.

In that regard these stories are not just cautionary tales but also modern allegories of the risks of isolation and loneliness.

Isolation, Suffering and Human Scale

Beyond Human Scale is Brené Brown’s latest podcast topic for Unlocking Us.

In her conversation with Esther Perel at SXSW they spoke about the long-hand of isolation and the immensity of loneliness and disconnection in our hyper-connected world (On The New AI: Artificial Intimacy).

Brown says: Attention is such an undervalued form of love.

Perel replies: Attention is an amazing quality because much of the time when people suffer or struggle, they don’t need fixing because some things can’t be fixed and not in the moment. So all they need is a witness. Attention is witnessing.

People have suffered from the day human beings have existed. There’s nothing new. But they always knew that the suffering needs to take placein the company of others. And these days we do too much suffering alone.

The comment about suffering in company has stayed with me.

Transformation isn’t suffering, but it is often rough. Doing it alone makes it harder than it could be.

Doing it with others makes it bearable — and times, even funny.

In The Company of Others

I was lucky enough to join a support group when I was pregnant. Preparing for a homebirth should not be fundamentally different to preparing to birth in a hospital or birth centre, but it is.

It was there, in support group, through my pregnancy and early months of mothering, and what ended up being the first three years of my son’s life, I sat with other women — drawing strength and wisdom from them.

It was there I learned the power of storytelling.

I’ve been in many circles since — both as participant and facilitator.

Both Prosperity Consciousness and Replenish had group sharing as a core component of them.

Earlier this year I also ran the Between Years sessions. We all came away from those mornings in awe of the soul and heart nourishment that being in a shared wisdom space with other women was.


Unseen

Collective storytelling and wisdom sharing, and communal learning and unfurling is one of the most transformative spaces I know. It’s what my winter depth work is built around.

We go into the dark woods together. And me navigate them together. And that togetherness forms a vital and protective illumination. It lights up the path and makes the unknown less scary.

We become the Hermit’s lantern for each other, as we seek our underworld stars.

Together we are no longer isolated. We are not alone.

We are seen. We are heard.

Unseen is a container where your struggles, your joy, your sorrow and your triumphs are all witnessed.

Your unfurling is supported in a cooperative way.

Your strength and tenacity are celebrated, alongside your tenderness and vulnerability.

Go Together

I’ve done plenty of healing and soul work alone. It has its time and place. But since Christina came into my life, I haven’t had to do it alone.

I am better for that shared experience, both professionally and personally.

On the cusp of the solar eclipse tomorrow, astrologer and social activist Chani Nicholas writes:

(the) solar eclipse in Aries is no joke. It requires us to confront the discomfort of (metaphorically) burning away what isn’t meant to stay. Occurring at 11:20 am PT (Monday) conjunct the Chiron cazimi, this eclipse invites us to go deep into our shadowlands and transmute our wounds.

If you want to take the next step, a deep dive into yourself in the company of others Unseen is the six month gift from yourself to yourself.

If you haven’t worked with me before and would like a feel for me and my way of doing things organise a TOE DIP free session.

For everyone riding the eclipse energy, be gentle. Consider the first kindness to yourself and do it.