Firstly, I want to express how good it feels to be here.
To have a space to express what lives inside me.
It’s ironic because this piece and my work are about the spaces I create for women to express what lives inside them.
This substack, feels like home, a place for me to land my ideas and my deep musings on love, life and creation.
Let’s dive in.
THE WILD WITHIN a 3-hour Workshop to Harness your Sacred Rage and Embody your Feminine Power. A workshop I created that took place on Feb 24th in person at Ilkley Haven on the Sunshine Coast.
I saw a need within my community for women to have a safe and sacred space to feel deeply. Specifically, I was seeing creative, talented and powerful women within my community weighted down with frustration, anger and grief without a safe and sacred space to process it. I was seeing fear of stepping into their gifts, fear of feeling that deeply, a lack of support in accessing heavier emotions and the blocks it was causing in life, business and relationships.
THE WILD WITHIN came to be from a place within me, where as a woman who holds others and feels deeply I need safe and sacred spaces to process the energy that lives inside me. For the last 8 years, I’ve been a participant in what I call WOMEN’S WORK. Sure there are women's circles, and there are workshops but then there is WOMEN’S WORK.
Women’s Work, to me are the spaces where you can bring ALL of yourself. They are deep, they are somatic and they a living. They ask you to meet yourself in the truth, feel what you feel and open the door to ALL that lives inside you.
So with my experience in this type of work my years of self-cultivation, facilitation and the need I saw within my community, I created THE WILD WITHIN.
I intended to bridge my worlds. I had formed beautiful connections in my newish 15-month-old community here on the Sunshine Coast. There are beautiful women, healing spaces, connections and events that support, celebrate and uplift the feminine (I’ve been involved in creating some of them) AND then there is the need I am seeing for the deeper spaces, the ones where ALL of the feminine is welcome, not just the light, love and fluffy, people pleasing, kinda share my truth spaces but the raw, messy, wild and deeply true expression of what lives inside us. These spaces and this work is what I call deep Shamanic Women’s Work. This is the work where you show up fully and lay yourself at the Altar of truth. It’s the work that has liberated me, my ancestry and rooted me deeply to myself and the earth and I felt it was time to share it.
THE WILD WITHIN came to be.
THE WILD WITHIN took place on the Full Moon in the dedicated women's space of Ilkley Haven based here on the Sunshine Coast.
I launched the event a week out and had 5 women attend, they arrived at 4.45 pm for a prompt start. There was me + Erin the custodian of the space who is also my friend, fellow facilitator and trusted guide. From there we went on a somatic journey through the inner realms to access any stuck and dormant energies that lived within, with the clear intention to meet, alchemise and liberate them.
Sounds simple right? Simple it is but meeting ourselves in these deeper layers can be confronting and ask a whole lot of us.
Anger and Rage live in our base chakras. It’s our security, our safety, and our sense of belonging, to ourselves and each other. A lot of the ways we are conditioned to relate are not true or honouring of our true selves, cue people pleaser and the ways we give our power away. They are based on what is going to provide us connection, belonging and safety and a lot of the time not what’s nourishing and true. Going in and clearing any ties, distortions and blockages to this energy at its core aligns us and our energy to ourselves first which then aligns everything else in our lives. It’s working with the direct cause and it’s powerful.Â
The results of working in this way means we gain more access to ourselves, our creativity, our voice, our power, the ability to say NO and therefore the ability to say YES. We stand in our truth and cut through the bullshit. It’s powerful and it works.
I acknowledge there are many reasons we get stuck or shut down, especially through our lineage, our own experiences in life as well as collective oppression. There is no cookie-cutter approach or solution. We are talking about women and their individual expression, lineage and life experience. It’s big work. However, when we work with the energy in this fundamental and core way we open the door to the root cause and shift things fundamentally.
We are each walking through the world caged, suppressed and shut down on different levels, some more than others. As expressed as I am I still find my truth and natural expression dormant in different places (inside myself and at times in the environments I find myself in) sometimes I don’t have the energy to carve out new spaces for myself or to fight for what I know to be true and before I know it a part of me is sitting in the background, dormant or hidden. It’s only when I intentionally create the space and meet myself deeply that I’m able to anchor back into me, my truth and what I stand for. Having spaces where I can meet myself in these deeper ways is not only supportive, it’s necessary for life to flow well.
This space was an opening for women to come together in safety and have the opportunity to learn how to work with themselves in these deeper ways. It was an opportunity to be seen, felt and witnessed expressing, feeling and sharing the truth that lived within them with the guidance, safety, support and permission to do so.
The space was held with deep reverence for the Feminine. It was gentle yet fierce and allowed each woman to meet her edge gently and safely.
Here is what I learnt from the Event
It’s not just rage and grief that wanted to be expressed. While this was the initial intention based on the need I was seeing within the community. The workshop highlighted that the full spectrum of emotion was asking to be felt. We had women in sheer joy, pleasure and play equally as frustration, grief and anger.Â
Emotions are not isolated. Opening the door to the emotional realms invited the expression of emotion full stop. Often one leads to another. Grief to pleasure, frustration to joy. It was beautiful to witness the women in the full spectrum of their emotion and allow the space for the full cycle to run.
What wants to move through each woman is different, each equally as beautiful and profound. Each womans expression provided a gift to the space through permission and the energetic transmission of raw unfiltered energy to be expressed and witnessed.
The space to express what lives within them with deep safety and reverence was powerful in and of itself. Each woman met a new part of herself through this experience.
Unpacking Wild. Wild, meaning natural state. A state that is free from cultivation and domestication. An important distinction is that Wild does not mean untethered, crazy and out of control.
The event got me curious about what it looks like to REWILD ourselves and what that actually means. I asked the question. What does it look like to get beneath the conditioning and preconceived ideas of what, who or how we should be? This to me is freedom. Freedom to allow what is true to be expressed without restriction, judgment or shame.
Definition:
To rewild ourselves is the process of unearthing the connection to our natural state beneath the conditioning, preconceived ideas and ways of being that are not true.
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Women in witness of each other in their natural state teaches us more about ourselves and each other than anything else.Â
When we create the safety for what lives within to be felt it creates space for beauty to be born.
I watched as each woman came more alive than what she was when she entered. I watched as each woman met herself in places she had not met before. I watched as she moved beyond fear and stepped through the threshold of her own power, expression and voice. I then sat back and received the voicenotes in the week that followed sharing the ripples that flowed into their lives as a result. One woman began sharing what she really felt with her husband, her clients and her children, she drew lines in the sand and created waves in her ability to speak her truth. She reported feeling resistant in the lead-up to the event and post the workshop feeling liberated by the ability to freely express her truth in ways she never had before. Another woman reported experiencing a spontaneous opening of pleasure and a powerful shift in her energy and in her words ‘integration has been profound.’
I watched as each woman rewrote the somatic memory in her body and the ripples that were created in the bodies of the women who witnessed. Each found more safety, more connection and more presence within.
When I take a step back to look at the space I created, it was a space to express what lives inside us. Whatever that looks like. It was created specifically for women who feel deeply and who hold others because I know what it’s like to walk through the world sensitive and attuned to the subtle realms without deep spaces to feel.
My goal as a facilitator was to allow participants to meet their edges and then some.
To take themselves places they perhaps haven’t been before.
When we can express the energy that lives inside us it frees up the space on the outside. Meaning more life, flow, alignment and meaningful action which then leads to satisfaction, fulfilment, and deeper connections with ourselves and others. It supports us to come alive and thrive.
You’ve heard the 80% energy 20% action rule. Well, this is working with the energy at its core.
This work is nuanced. There is no one size fits all BUT there is a way to work with it.
Through coming together in safe and sacred spaces like this one to see, feel and experience one another we clear the cobwebs, open the door and allow more life to flow in and who doesn’t want more life?
We show the way through our embodiment, through who we are and how safe people feel in our presence. It’s my goal that the ripples from this event will continue to flow and as each woman who walks through the world a little more free she gives others permission to do the same.
After a week of integration, feedback and the shifts women are reporting I will open the space again next month.
THE WILD WITHIN will take place Sunday 24th March at Ilkley Haven. The details can be found here.
The Wild Within | March 24
