Good morning dear friend,

Today I want to honour the edge walkers who sit on the boundary wall, at the cooling of the forest, stretching possibilities and opening doors to more honest ways of being. Threshold guardians who can take us by the hand and extend a rare kindness that gives us the permission to go beyond the known and, especially as women, the acceptable.

If you are here, it is likely you are one of these forest dwellers. Perhaps we all are, beneath the surface. We all have parts that are longing to tear off the clothes of what Toko-Pa Turner calls ‘false belonging’ and walk into the realms of fresh possibility and free expression. To find our true home. To be unmoored.

The overculture is a prison and we all wear its chains. If we are fortunate enough to have found guides, paths, perspectives and communities that help us loosen the corsetry of conditioning then we are truly blessed. To find the fullness of our breath. To know there is freedom beneath the voices we have internalised from our families, schools and governments. To find our own voices in the mysterium of Psyche and to learn how to listen to their quiet whispers and their harrowing cries. To finally recognise that this is where belonging lives, in extending our hands to the shamed and shunned ones within. Those who were cast out of the garden and who teach us what compassion really looks like.

I find it so helpful to be around women who are starting to foam at the incisors. Who roar a little louder and are breaking out of their confinement because it helps me to love those parts of myself more kindly. I sat with a friend yesterday and asked her to remind me of her daughter’s name. Lilith, she replied. I felt the curl at the corners of my muzzle.

I have many impressions laid into my memory of witnessing women in their freedom. And it’s often the crones who make the biggest mark on me because they are the most free and embody the most beauty. I have seen what true beauty is in a woman and it has been the greatest gift and privilege. Yesterday I taught the last Embodied Movement class at my local studio after nearly 4 years of offering to this small but perfectly formed community of outliers. The class was cut because it doesn’t get the targeted numbers. There’s a great deal I could say about this but I know it speaks for itself.

This is a group of extraordinary women who have attended class pretty much every week since August 2022. I received a card from one dear soul who thanked me “for more than three years of letting me be myself". It’s so rare to have permission to be fully ourselves, especially in spaces where there is a code of conformity. Where only certain bodies that wear certain clothes can feel like they belong. The true practice, of course, is to tear all of that down and dissolve the limited knowledge that keeps us from realising that we are all God and that all of us is God. That it all belongs and that all your weird and wild ways are welcome.

One day we will have our own space, somewhere in the Italian countryside, where all the ones who don’t belong can find their belonging

In the meantime we have our retreat in July and if you would like to slip into the wide embrace of such a community then hit reply and I’ll send you the details. It will be 5 nights of meditation and movement in the Scottish Hebrides, July 13-18th.

Thank you to all the beautiful souls who find their way to this work and this community. We are so lucky to have each other.

To all the parts of you, I send my love.

Col 🌹