I mean, I do it three days a week, when my daughter is with me, because there is no point in tidying up when the house will become a creative hurricane again in just moments after tidying.

I spent the first three years postpartum trying to keep the house consistently tidy and realised it was such a waste of my precious life force.

I mean, we are already in a baseline level of depletion as a new mother, particularly if we are breastfeeding. Our children quite literally soak up every nutrient and mineral we have.

What I have learned though, is how to be efficient.

I get a cleaner once a fortnight for a deep clean. And then I tidy rigorously for an hour every monday morning after the school run. I then have four full days of a tidy house to get into business.

You see, I can’t do “business” if my house is not clean.

A clean house, a clean mind.

The internal reflects the external.

Marie Kondo rights about this religiously. My team used to joke about me and create memes of me as the Marie Kondo of business. I have them somewhere still, floating around.

Because before I do any client work, or get into “business” mode, I have to clean. Cleaning creates a clear internal state where I can really just relax and be on task without thinking of anything else.

Some would call it OCD.

I call it energetic hygeine.

I mean, it is what I teach.

As within, so without.

And the opposite is also true.

I also find it therapeutic and cathartic to clean. It allows me to move my body and to release and express anything I have pent up in my system, from my solo parenting stint.

I put on some of my favourite music, I have my drip coffee with raw milk and an assortment of spagyric liquid mushroom tinctures (these are the best, btw) and I move with the rush, I clean and then I sit down and exhale and feel ready to open my computer for the day, or attend to emails.

That is my monday morning ritual, one I just finished before sitting down and enjoying the one crack of sunshine coming through my window, as I write this for you here and now.

SB. X

Paid subscribers get early (and full) access to new essays, occasional behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m working through & monthly live guest speaker interviews. I hope you enjoy this article.

Big love,

SB x

I cried last night, watching videos of Kevin Reddington, Lindsey Clancy’s lawyer, standing for her and advocating for the failure and disregard of the system and those around her, for providing her with the care she needed post partum, as she was journeying through severe post partum psychosis.

I have so much to unpack with this case, and how this is creating the stage for us collectively to really witness this huge open gaping wound and shadow we have as a collective around postpartum care and the fragility and vulnerability of women in the fourth trimester.

But before I start, let me share more about the case and why it matters to me.

First of all, I am a Mother and I have intimately journeying these ways in which our society negates birth trauma, postpartum depression and mental health (although I refer to it as postpartum depletion, the term my doctor and teacher Dr Oscar Serralach coined). I have journeyed it myself, experiencing postpartum depression and PTSD after the intense emotional stress I experienced in pregnancy and early postpartum — I write about my journey intimately in my book The MotherWild Revolution: Cultural Change through Generational Activism, which is a available worldwide throughout book stores. This book was designed to speak to the collective shadows of the West, which turn away from pregnancy and matrescence, often leaving women, like Lindsey Clancy, unsupported and having to adjust to the changes of Motherhood alone, without the web of nourishment needed to actually thrive (or even survive, in this case) the postpartum period.

Not nearly enough of us are talking about how harrowing the experiences of early postpartum / the fourth trimester are… we are expected to just pick back up again, with no sleep, with a child on us that needs us every minute of the day. It is impossible without a wider web of community support. And yet, here we are — and we are paying the consequences of it — and this case is the perfect mirror for us to look at this collective blind spot, right now, and urgently.

The context.

Right now, in a courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a woman named Lindsay Clancy is on trial for the deaths of her three children. Her defense argues she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis when it happened — a rare, catastrophic break from reality that can develop with terrifying speed in the weeks after birth. The prosecution argues she is criminally responsible regardless. The public has split itself, predictably, into the same two camps it always forms around a mother's unthinkable act: monster, or victim of a system that had every chance to catch her and didn't.

I'm not interested in relitigating her guilt. I'm interested in the fact that this case has become the only occasion, apparently, on which we're willing to talk about what childbirth does to the nervous system.

Postpartum psychosis is rare. It affects somewhere between one and two women per thousand births. It is not what I want to write about today, because focusing there lets us treat Clancy as an outlier — a devastating but statistically remote event, contained, explicable, over there. What I want to write about is the condition sitting underneath it, wearing no headlines, affecting a population roughly a hundred times larger, and going almost entirely unscreened for. It has a name now. It's called CB-PTSD — childbirth-related post-traumatic stress disorder — and the fact that most women have never heard of it is itself the diagnosis.

I have been immersing myself into the study of CB- PTSD since my own transition into Motherhood, in formal studies and training in Matriarchal Medicine, a body of work created by Dr. Oscar Serralach, who is spear heading this collective issue and educating healthcare practitioners like myself, worldwide with this wisdom. I highly recommend reading his book: The Postnatal Depletion Cure.

What CB-PTSD actually is

CB-PTSD is PTSD, full stop, with childbirth as the precipitating trauma. It meets the same clinical architecture as any other post-traumatic response: intrusive re-experiencing of the birth through flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance of anything that recalls it, negative shifts in mood and self-perception, and a nervous system locked in hyperarousal — the exhausted, wired, can't-put-the-baby-down-and-can't-rest-either state that gets waved off as "new mother anxiety" because nobody thought to ask what happened in the delivery room. And with more and more women opting for non-natural deliveries (which radically increase the incidence of CB PTSD), we are seeing an epidemic of women who are not coping.

The numbers are not marginal.

Across the general postpartum population, somewhere between five and six percent of women meet full diagnostic criteria — which translates to roughly 240,000 American women a year, and by some estimates 6.6 million mothers worldwide annually, plus another 1.7 million fathers and co-parents carrying trauma from witnessing it. Among women whose deliveries were medically complicated or experienced as traumatic, that rate climbs to somewhere between eighteen and forty-one percent. Black and Latinx women are roughly three times more likely to develop an acute traumatic stress response to birth than white women, which tells you plainly that this isn't only a psychiatric question. It's a question of who gets listened to, whose pain gets treated as data, and whose gets treated as drama.

None of this requires a catastrophic or unusual birth to take root. A birth can look, on paper, like a clinical success — live baby, discharged on schedule, no chart flags — and still leave the person who delivered it with a nervous system that has filed the experience under threat to life. Trauma is not defined by what the obstetric record says happened. It's defined by what the body decided happened.

The six-week appointment is a joke, and not a funny one

Here is the part that should make you angry rather than sad. The standard of postpartum care in most of the developed world is a single check-up at six weeks. One appointment, typically fifteen minutes, typically focused on the incision or the stitches or whether contraception has been discussed, often using a screening tool — the EPDS — that was built to catch depression and anxiety and was never designed to detect trauma at all. Reproductive psychiatrists have pointed out plainly that this system is "not going to catch people who are at risk of symptoms," only those already presenting in that narrow window. And the period researchers now identify as highest-risk — six to eight weeks postpartum — sits right at the edge of when we stop looking.

So a woman can leave the hospital with unprocessed terror lodged in her body, receive no trauma screening whatsoever, be handed a mood questionnaire she may not even correctly represent because dissociation and hyperarousal don't always look like sadness, get cleared, and be sent home to raise an infant while her body runs a threat-response loop nobody named for her. This is not a gap in the system. This is the system working exactly as designed, and the design was never built around the actual physiology of birth.

Birth is a bodily event before it is anything else

Birth is not a medical event that happens to also involve a body. It is a bodily event, one of the most extreme the human nervous system will ever undergo, that we have chosen to administer medically. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously for how we prepare people for it, how we witness them through it, and how we care for them after.

We already know, from decades of trauma literature that has nothing to do with childbirth, that an event doesn't need to be freak or rare to overwhelm the nervous system's capacity to metabolize it. It needs to involve a perceived threat to life or bodily integrity, insufficient support in the moment, and no adequate discharge afterward. Childbirth can satisfy every one of those conditions inside a hospital room that everyone in it considers routine. Untreated, that unmetabolized activation doesn't just sit quietly. It reshapes the mother-infant bond, since the infant himself can become a living trigger for the very event the body is still trying to survive. It disrupts breastfeeding. It corrodes partnerships. It makes a second pregnancy something to be feared rather than chosen freely.

What treating birth as trauma would actually require

Not a hashtag. Not another awareness week. It would require validated trauma screening — not just depression screening — built into postpartum visits, administered at the moment we now know the risk peaks, not six weeks too early. It would require obstetric and midwifery staff trained to recognize peritraumatic distress as it's happening in real time, in the room, rather than retroactively, once someone has already unraveled. It would require treatment pathways — trauma-focused therapies with a track record here, EMDR among them — that are actually funded and actually accessible, rather than something a woman has to self-diagnose her way into finding. And it would require, underneath all of it, a cultural willingness to say the sentence that somatic practitioners have been saying quietly for years and obstetric medicine still mostly won't: that a live baby and a healthy chart are not proof that nothing traumatic happened.

Not only that, it requires collective gaze and collective change towards understanding the fourth trimester, the changes in the brain and nervous system that happen with Matrescence, and a collective leaning into this issue, to create better supports for women to be nourished, held, and to have time off to breathe and adjust to a new life postpartum.

Because we do not “return to normal” — this is a permanent change, and a huge adjustment. And it needs to be treated as such.

Lindsay Clancy's trial will end the way it ends. Whatever verdict comes down, it will not touch the deeper failure underneath it — the one where hundreds of thousands of women a year are sent home from the place they gave birth with no name for what's happening in their bodies, no one who screened for it, and no plan beyond "see you at six weeks." I don't know what is going to happen in that courtroom, but I do know that if we keep treating the fourth trimester as an administrative afterthought instead of the acute nervous-system event it is, we will keep manufacturing the exact conditions that produce catastrophe, and we will keep being shocked when it arrives.

The cracks were always going to surface eventually. I'd rather we looked at them before the next one does.

Paid subscribers get early (and full) access to new essays, occasional behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m working through & monthly live guest speaker interviews. I hope you enjoy this article.

Big love,

SB x

I came across a line recently by Joel Uili, from his body of work The Career Archetypes, that really resonated with me:

"One reason people are jealous of other people's work is because they are confronting a dormant possibility of themselves."

Ahhh, so true, I thought.

A big exhale and breath out: he gets it.

In fact, I love most of what he shares.

Because this has been medicine for me.

Envy, that is.

Jealousy as the poison that has driven me towards more ambition within myself, when i’ve alchemised it and turned it into the gold it desires to be transformed into.

It has been one of my most prized golden shadows.

Real, working medicine, not a nice idea I hold at arm's length. When envy arrives — and it still arrives, because I am human before I am anything else I've built or trained or titled myself — I don't project it outward. I don't let it curdle into commentary about the other person, into the small cruelties envy is so good at disguising itself as. I sit with it. I ask it a direct question: where am I not yet owning this quality in myself?

And then — this is the part that actually changes something — I move toward it. Not away from the person who triggered it. Not away from the feeling itself. Toward the dormant possibility the feeling is pointing at.

Envy is not a character flaw. It's a compass.

Most of us were taught that envy is shameful — something to hide, deny, spiritually bypass with a quick "I'm just so happy for them!" that doesn't reach the belly. But envy is data. It is one of the most precise instruments we have for locating our own unclaimed territory.

You don't envy things that are irrelevant to you. Nobody green with jealousy over a stranger's taste in wallpaper. Envy only ignites around what is possible for you — a capacity, a boldness, a visibility, a body of work — that some part of you has already recognised as available, and another part of you has not yet given permission to exist.

This is the alchemical move: envy is unlived life, seen in someone else's body, calling itself by the wrong name.

The projection trap

The unconscious way of handling envy is projection — casting the disowned quality onto the other person as a flaw.

She's arrogant. He's overexposed. They didn't even earn it.

This is the ego's oldest trick, and it works because it feels like discernment rather than defense.

Jung would call this shadow material — the parts of ourselves we've exiled because they were dangerous, or too much, or simply unmodelled by anyone who raised us. What we can't own, we disown by locating it in someone else and then judging it there, at a safe distance, instead of metabolising it where it actually belongs.

Projection protects the ego. Owning does something else entirely — it grows the self.

The practice

When envy shows up now, I run it through three movements:

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Or how it was the only thing that helped me survive postnatal depression, as I adjusted to becoming a new solo mother, with bare minimal support, still attempting to run a full time business, somehow managing to hold it all together still.

My book The MotherWild Revolution: Cultural Change through Generational Activism was my safe space. The place I got to share the journey that I did not feel ready to tell the world. It is where I scribbled and expressed the postpartum rage I felt, alchemising my hurt into something of substance for the world to read.

Writing has always been this for me. It has been a gift to myself, first and foremost, to help me process and make sense of the workings of my inner world. And then somehow, often, my words become Autotheory, helping others too. I can’t tell you the amount of messages I receive from people who tell me, “I could have written that myself”, or “I felt like you were writing that book for me”.

I write the things that most people lock away in their basement. And I do this, because it keeps me sane. Watching the movie Hamnet (which, by the way, is an incredibly film), I felt a sense of relief in my body as I watched William Shakespeare go mad, sitting at his desk every evening, scribing his creative ideas as though it was his lifeline.

This is how I feel (and have felt) most of my life. If I don’t write, I will die. But, truly. When I don’t get my ideas onto paper, there is a kind of madness that lives within me.

If you have words within you, that you have not yet shared…. because you do not know where to start… or you do not feel like you are a “good enough” writer… or whatever the resistance is… I encourage you to feel that and do it anyway.

I have written and published four bestselling books over the past decade, and am about to publish my fifth. I have been able to do this, because I have support structures in place to help me scribe my words into structure.

The place in which I do this, is inside a live book writing retreat — not held by me, but by friends of mine who have been doing this for over a decade now, who are impecable at creating spaces for people to feel seen and to finally say what they need to say. And publish.

I am joining another this October and I wanted to invite you to join me, here

I have done this container around 8 times now, and continue returning to write my books.

Use the code SIG until midnight tonight to receive the early bird cost at $750USD

Or join me in 2027, here.

I saw clouds open, and a ray of light shine down between them onto me.

It reminded me of the experience I had, working with one of my favourite clients, a few years ago, when she had just received her terminal illness diagoses: pancreatic cancer.

This client was one of my favourites.

She had done every training of mine. She was an enthusiastic learner. She was a deep diver. When she told me of her diagnosis, something inside of me sank.

But she did not want to give up. She was determined to fight it. She had been a fighter her entire life. And yet, something deep inside of her gave up when her son committed suicide. There was a deep grief within her, that she couldn’t locate.

I could feel it palpably, as though it was my own. She had a desire to be reignited with him. She felt a guilt that she outsurvived him. I can only imagine what this must feel like.

Every time I worked on her, after her diagnosis, I could feel it.

She was consciously telling me she wanted to live.

But I could feel the part of her, that did not. And I could never reconcile the two.

It was through my journey of treating her, up until death, that I learned that sometimes, our unconscious self and conscious selves do not and will not agree to the same path.

Every time I worked on her body, I could see her spirit longing to leave.

But consciously, she would turn up, every session, telling me she wanted to live.

The discrepancy still lives within me somatically, as a memory now.

She taught me that death has it’s own agenda for us. Spirit wants something for us, that perhaps, our consciousness cannot fully grasp.

Working with her, humbled me.

I have worked with so many clients at the time of their passing — most, who get to the point where they choose to leave.

I have learned to listen more deeply, beyond the words, beyond the desires we have.

Listening at the level of spirit is an immensely challenging gift. Because it puts our human selves out of control. And yet, when we surrender to spirit, there is a type of grace that touches us that is not there and cannot be accessed through human will alone.

I wish all people to know this about death.

By fighting against it, it makes the rite of passage challenging. If we allow love to carry us through the gates and doorways of light that death provides us with, it is the most beautiful doorway we will ever experience.

Paid subscribers get early (and full) access to new essays, occasional behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m working through & monthly live guest speaker interviews. I hope you enjoy this article.

Big love,

SB x

Last night, the fox that I recently found dead on the side of the road, that asked me to skin it and honour it, carrying it through to the afterlife, visited me in my sleep.

Initially, he just looked at me.

I know it is a he, as I skinned him. And he had that stench that a male fox has — of urine.

He then informed me that it was time to bury his carcass… with roses.

You see, I had left his remains in the forest for the birds to feast on. I knew at some time I would bury him, but first he needed to be offered over to the animal realms for feasting upon.

And if you didn’t read the post I wrote on my journey and medicine with the fox, you can do so here.

I was talking to a friend this morning and it prompted me to write this article, on the nature of spiritual service, and how it often offers us protection.

Often I receive messages that I need to be in service in some way to the unseen realms — to someone that is passing over, whether it be an animal or a human, or to someone that is suffering that needs guidance. I used to see these queues as distractions and think “why me” … I mean… what do I actually get in return for offering myself over in this way? I wrote a whole article on it once, called We Don’t Give Enough Credit To The Mystics

I would get frustrated that so much of my time was about doing rituals and guiding forces in the unseen realm… with absolutely no recognition at all.

That was until I learned a little humility and now I treat these spiritual asks and quests as profound gifts — ones that not only free other’s but also that free my own spirit.

Not only that, but by being in service to the spirit realm, without wanting anything in return, I am often divinely protected.

This morning, I was talking about how I have always managed to avoid getting in trouble because I have a huge team of unseen protectors.

And that people that mess with me, often pay the repurcussions — not from my own hand, and certainly not through my own conscious intent, but from spirits hand.

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Paid subscribers get early (and full) access to new essays, occasional behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m working through & monthly live guest speaker interviews. I hope you enjoy this article.

Big love,

SB x

Last week I had the opportunity to reflect on just how much I have changed, since becoming a Mother.

Since becoming a Mother, I have lost contact with many of the people that I was once affilated with, in my maidenhood years. Motherhood closed the door to an old self: a self that in many ways, lacked boundaries and containment and that was concerned with networking and being out in the world much more than I am now.

And just this week, I had the opportunity to recognise just how different my life is, now.

Somehow, an ex client of mine from at least seven years ago (as I fell pregnant nearly six years ago now… yes, I have a five year old), came into my field, commenting to a friend of mine about how she felt I used to “siphon” her energy.

And it is a funny thing. I shrink at those words, because there is not a single part of me that wishes to “siphon” from anyone. Even the idea of that kind of vampiric energetic disturbs me. I am in constant reflection of how life is constantly in karmic reaction to the way that I show up, and there is no way that I would ever want the karma of a succubus.

AND I was just speaking to some of my students this week, on how my energy hygeine as a practitioner and teacher was sometimes horrible in my more youthful maiden years. I got away with treating my body in substandard ways. I drank a lot of coffee and constantly pushed past my own limits and boundaries.

In our maiden years, we are more focused on width than we are depth.

Motherhood is an initiation into descent. It teaches us the importance of honouring our physical vessel, of boundaries and of protecting our intimate space.

And Motherhood, for me, was a profound teacher in this respect. It was pregnancy that really taught me energetic containment. You cannot maintain the same levels of “out there” in pregnancy and early post partum, because you only have the resources to sustain yourself and your babe.

And here is the thing: when we push past our own boundaries and our energy leaks, it can feel like a “siphoning” of others energies. Because we have to draw our energy from somewhere. And even if it is deeply unconscious, those that are in depletion, will draw upon others they are connected to in the field to essentially feed on.

That is why teaching boundaries, consent, energy hygeine and also how to nourish the physical vessel are core pillars now within all of my teaching programs.

I will be teaching a masterclass in the coming week called Commanding the room: The Energetics of Space Holding and those within my paid substack community will receive the recording free of charge.

Because this has been one of my deepest learnings in this lifetime; and it is one that I continually deepen into with every year I orbit the sun.

With love,

Sigourney Belle X

Paid subscribers get early (and full) access to new essays, occasional behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m working through & monthly live guest speaker interviews. I hope you enjoy this article.

Big love,

SB x

First of all, I feel to start off by sharing that I share about these dynamics, because of my love of pattern tracking psychological traits. I share about them, as I am digesting them, through my own relationships and connections. This writings are not me analysing something far off — they are my personal unpackings and lenses, unique to my experiences.

With all of that being said, let’s get started.

This article was inspired by a video I watched two days ago, which was speaking about Men and The Shame Wound, and how the deeper the shame, the stronger the polarisation into ego structure.

Ie. the more we associate with a voice that tells us we are unworthy, often the stronger the personality structure that is built, to prove that worth.

This morning, I took that musing a level deeper. I was reflecting on a few behaviours I have noticed in people close to me recently… namely, the desire to be “special”.

I thought about it… special…

Normally when we reenact something so strongly, it is because it has been compartmentalised somewhere within us… or demonised. Essentially, we have told ourselves we cannot have the thing that we so deeply desire or want, and so the ego structure tries to draw at it and create it in any way that it can.

I was thinking about narcissism and how often underneath this personality trait, is a desire to be special. When diving into this pattern, I saw a small child, so desperate for attention from their parents, and not receiving it.

The desire to be loved, to be made to feel special, was met with absence.

And that sense of absence doesn’t disappear — it just gets louder later in life. The adult who needs to be the smartest person in the room, the most spiritually advanced, the most uniquely wounded, the most talented — that adult is often still standing in a kitchen doorway at six years old, waiting for someone to look up.

This compensation is often very specific later in life. A child who was told, directly or through neglect, that their intelligence was inconvenient will often grow an adult identity fused entirely to being the smart one. A child whose sensitivity was treated as too much will often grow an adult who needs to be recognised as the most attuned, the most spiritually gifted, the deepest feeler in every room. The shape of the wound predicts the shape of the armour. We don't perform randomly — we perform the exact opposite of what we were denied.

This is where I think the shame-wound video and this morning's musing meet. Shame says you are not enough as you are. The ego structure responds by manufacturing a version of "enough" so loud it can't be questioned. Specialness, in this reading, isn't vanity. It's architecture built over a hole.

The remedy?

Remind your children of their importance to you.

Treat them as a blessing. Remind them that they are a gift.

This week, as I tucked Caerulea into bed, I said to her: “do you know how special you are to me? How much you mean to me"?”

She said: “really?”

I said, “yes, I am so incredibly lucky to have you”

She replied with: “thankyou, I am lucky to have you too.”

These words take only a minute, and can change the entire psychological infrastructure and patterning of your childs self image and reflection.

Big love,

SB x

Ps. for more of my musings on Motherhood, you can purchase my recent published book The MotherWild Revolution here.

Sharing my success online has never been easy for me. Partly because I have never been taught to celebrate myself or my work in the world, from a young age. I’ve always skipped over the part where i’m meant to stop and pause and celebrate myself before working on the next creation. I’ve had to actively work on this, to remedy it over the years and I must say… i’m starting to get good at the sacred celebratory pause now.

But I want to speak about the shadow side of entrepreneurial success, just for a moment… The flinch that happens right before I post about something that is going well in my life. A retreat that filled. A book that sold out its first print run.

The flinch isn't typically because of modesty. It's pattern recognition…

Because here's what I've noticed, over a decade of building something in public: the moment you're visibly an entrepreneur, people stop seeing a person and start seeing a category. "Capitalist" gets projected onto you like a costume you never asked to wear, and once it's on, something strange happens to the social contract. People who would never dream of asking a stranger for money suddenly feel a kind of entitlement — to your time, your labour, your generosity, your surplus. As if success were evidence of a debt you now owe others in a room.

I call it the coin flip. Abundance shows up, and somewhere in the exchange, it flips from something I built to something that's owed.

The projection does the work of erasing the person

"Capitalist" is rarely a description, in this context. It's a story someone tells about you that lets them skip the actual relationship. It flattens years of risk, of unpaid labour, of showing up for people at 2am, of building something from nothing on a coastline with a small child and no safety net — into a single, frictionless assumption. She has. Therefore she can give. Therefore I can take.

Once that story is running, asking doesn't feel like asking anymore. It feels justified. Critiquing doesn't feel like critique — it feels like accountability. And the person underneath the projection, the one who built the thing, disappears entirely from the frame.

Scarcity looks outward before it looks inward

Now, this pattern… Most of the time it's scarcity, doing what scarcity does — looking for somewhere else the abundance could be, because it can't yet locate any in itself. Visible success becomes a mirror people don't want to look into, so they turn it into a target instead. Easier to name someone else "capitalist" than to sit with your own relationship to money, worth, and want.

But understanding the mechanism doesn't make it cost less to be on the receiving end of it. It's still a heavy thing to carry, especially when the actual content of the work is the opposite of extraction.

In fact, everything I have ever built has come from some kind of ache that i’ve been longing to serve in others. A desire to do good in the world. Success has never been the goal, but it has been a result of showing up in dedication to a body of work, that serves thousands of people every year with their health.

I was sitting with this whole article, this morning — namely, the title “the coin flip” because the irony of people that try to extract from those that have wealth and success, is that they are repeating the same paradigm they are trying to critique — the capitalistic extraction program. In many ways, they are themselves embodying everything that they are trying to avoid and escape.

The bind of building something abundant in public

This is the tension that I sit with: how do you build something relational, generous, abundant — and still protect it from being treated as communal property the second it starts to work? How do you stay open-handed with your gifts without your open hand being read as an invitation to take?

I don't think the answer is to stop being visible. I think it's to stop apologising for the visibility. Abundance isn't the thing that needs defending — the story that abundance equals obligation is. I can be someone who built something real, who benefits from having built it, and who still gets to decide, on my own terms, where my generosity flows and where it doesn't. Those aren't contradictions. They only look like contradictions through the coin-flip lens.

So I'm writing this less as a conclusion and more as a marker. A way of naming the pattern out loud so it loses some of its grip — on me, and maybe on you, if you've felt this too. Success isn't a debt. Abundance isn't a public utility. And the people who project "capitalist" onto you rarely want to know the actual, textured, effortful truth of how you got here. They want the story that lets them skip it.

I'd rather tell the truth.

Which is precisely the antithesis of what death actually offers. Death is a direct portal into the existential fears that we all have, sitting somewhere deep inside of us — the fear that we are but human, inifinte, only here for a brief moment in the spectrum of the time continuum.

It’s very human to need to work it all out and get to the “bottom” of something. It’s a deeply human impulse — to work a death “out,” to arrive at the bottom of it, as if grief had a floor.

In the days since her passing, I’ve watched people go live to channel what they believe happened to her. To narrate her final days as though they’d witnessed them. To offer a root cause, packaged and certain, delivered with some kind of hierarchical confidence.

I have my own insights here. I work in this field — as a psychopomp, someone who sits at the threshold between the living and the dead, who has spent years learning to be with a soul in transition rather than to explain it. And still, I have no interest in offering “my take” publicly.

A take implies a conclusion.

But the deeper work that comes with being around death is this: it brings up all that we have to confront around our own relationship to the finite, to this physical form. Our own innate buried complexes and terror around death… which is, ultimately, the terror of our capacity for aliveness — the irony of death is that it is the very entry point to experiencing the inifinte.. when we make peace with it and journey through and beyond our own existential terrors. I use the word existential here, to honour Carolyn’s profound body of work, Existential Kink. One that most of us could be reading right now, which would be more of an honouring to her, than our “hot take” on her death.

Reducing a person’s death to one root cause erases the complexity of the psyche that carried her, and everything else she may have been holding underneath it. Carolyn was a whole person. Not a case study, not a lesson, not a warning dressed up as reverence. Whatever the true circumstances of her passing, she deserves to be met as the beautifully layered, contradictory, divine being she was in life. Diagnosing her death in public is a kind of diminishment dressed as tribute.

There’s a season, right after someone dies, when the appropriate posture is humility. Not analysis. A quieting. A bowing down, for a while, before the mystery of what a life was and what its ending means. Public psychoanalysis of a person’s death skips that entirely. It rushes toward resolution because resolution is easier to sit with than grief.

A friend of mine, Dane Tomas, put something to me this morning that’s stayed with me all day: that this instinct to produce the next hot take, the next channelled explanation, is tacky. That’s the right word for it. It is tacky — and comes across in the way it is to fill a silence that was never asking to be filled.

So here is what I’d offer instead: save the analysis. Let it go quiet in you for a moment. Feel what’s actually there in her passing, underneath the need to explain it — which might be more confronting than a clean narrative ever could be, because Carolyn’s death hits close to something in many of us. It makes us enquire about the cost of the work she did. It reflects back something about our own mortality, our own shadow…

That’s my honouring of this woman who shaped so many lives, including in ways I’m still discovering in myself. Not to reduce her, not to explain her, but to let her remain exactly as she was.

On honouring the dead

If the impulse to explain isn’t the way through, what is? A few things I return to, in this work and in my own life, when someone significant has died.

Storytelling. Not the story of how someone died, but the story of how they lived. Tell the moment she said the thing that changed how you thought about your own shame. Tell the way she laughed, if you knew her, or the way her writing sounded in your head like she was in the room with you, if you didn’t. Stories keep a person textured. They resist the flattening that theories of death always perform.

Recalling fond memories, out loud, with other people. Grief isolates when it’s held alone and processed in silence, or worse, in a comment section. Call someone who loved her work too. Say her name to them. Let the memory move between you instead of staying locked in your own head, where it will start to calcify into a theory whether you want it to or not.

Simple rituals of release. Light a candle at the same time each evening for a week, or for the traditional forty days many traditions mark as a soul’s transition. Write her a letter — not for publication, just for the fire, or the earth, or the drawer. Speak her name aloud with gratitude before you speak it with anything else.

Marking the threshold, not the cause. In many traditions, the emphasis at death isn’t on what happened but on where the soul is going, and what it needs from the living to travel well. Offer that instead. A blessing. A prayer. Good company on the way out, rather than a verdict on the way she got there.

Letting the not-knowing stay unresolved. This might be the hardest one. Some things about a person’s death are simply not ours to know, and reaching for false certainty to soothe our own discomfort is its own small act of disrespect. Reverence sometimes looks like an open hand instead of a closed conclusion.

We don’t owe the dead our theories. We owe them our presence, and our willingness to let their complexity remain intact even after they’re gone.

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Big love,

SB x

Someone asked me this week, "You are doing so much creatively — when do you switch off?"

I giggled to myself.

There's an assumption tucked inside that question, one I understand because I used to carry it myself. It goes something like this: a full life is a draining life, and creative output is a withdrawal from some finite account, so eventually you have to stop everything and lie face-down somewhere to refill it. Rest, in this model, is a separate room you retreat to. A door you close on your life in order to survive your life.

That's not how it works in my world anymore. It’s not how it’s worked for me for a long time — ever since just before my first Saturn return, in fact, when I left my full time career locuming around hospitals in Australia with just 1k in my bank account to commit full time to doing what I love.

Someone who isn't following their creative inspirations has to schedule recovery, has to carve out "time off" like a surgical intervention, because the rest of their days are spent leaking energy into places that don't feed them. Of course I have periods of recovery too. But mine aren't scheduled interruptions to my life — they're woven through the fabric of it.

Every morning starts with tea ceremony and meditation. I receive bodywork weekly, hands on my body reminding it that it's allowed to soften. I walk daily in nature, no agenda, just my body moving and trees and whatever the sky is doing. These aren't wellness boxes I tick before getting to the "real" work. They *are* part of how the work happens.

And here's the part that surprises people most: following all of my creative threads is itself deeply relaxing. When I let a thread run — when I actually follow the pull of a project, a piece of writing, a line of research that's alive in me — it stops pacing behind the door of my attention. It stops knocking. A neglected creative impulse doesn't go quiet just because you're ignoring it. It gets louder. It shows up at 2am. It sits on your chest during the meditation you're using to avoid it. The idea that discipline means suppressing your instincts until designated "off" hours is, in my experience, exactly backwards — it's what keeps people wired and depleted at once.

My creativity is fed. Which means my breaks are actual breaks — not escape doors from a life I'm quietly fleeing. There's a real difference between resting *from* something and resting *within* something. One is relief. The other is rhythm.

And I don't think (or want this to be) a superior-person parable. Sometimes I do need the escape door too — the collapse, the nothing-day, the full unplug when the field gets too loud even for someone whose life is built this way. That's allowed. It doesn't undo any of the above. It's just the other instrument in the same orchestra: structural rest for the ordinary days, and permission to fall apart a little when the extraordinary ones ask for it.

What I've stopped doing is treating rest as evidence that the rest of my life is unsustainable. It isn't a rescue mission. It's just Tuesday.

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Normally, I am always someone to stop and let people pass — I am frequently the one trying to cross the road with a small child in tow, and I believ…

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Now, copper is not the only isolated mineral that can create a collapse in the biofield and reduced defence systems, opening the nervous system up to being more permeable to …

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This morning the question arose within me, “I wonder if Demon’s can be passed down through someones bloodline”.

My sense is, yes. I have seen people with intergenerational curses before. So why not, intergenerational possession?

The rage that arrives before any provocation. The dread that settles in the body decades before the body has lived enough to earn it. The compulsion that runs identically through three generations of women who never spoke to each other about it. Are we haunted by our own history or possessed by someone else’s?

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Paid subscribers get early (and full) access to new essays, occasional behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m working through & monthly live guest speaker interviews. I hope you enjoy this article.

Big love,

SB x

We are told that “midlife” equates to a crisis.

And sure, it can be that. For many, it is that.

But not too many people talk about the purpose behind the crisis…. what is causing it, and why.

Because it is not God just being a sadomasochist, inflicting pain for the sake of it.

No, midlife crisis is more like a midlife awakening.

And from an astrological perspective, it is a period, where you undergo rapid transformation and initiation, to become more of who you are. And to tolerate less bullshit.

The body is going through and experiencing radical change according to a number of astrological events, several of them stacked on top of each other, and the discomfort is the sensation of a soul outgrowing a container it built in its twenties.

The Third Jupiter Return: Age 36

Jupiter completes its orbit roughly every twelve years, and by 36 most of us have lived through it three times. The first return, at 12, arrives while we’re still children and passes through us largely unmetabolized. The second, at 24, coincides with early adulthood, still tangled in the project of proving ourselves. The third return is different. By 36 there’s enough lived experience underneath the philosophy for it to mean something. Jupiter asks where your belief systems have grown too small for the person you’ve become, and the third return is where that question really lands with weight. Expect an appetite for expansion that feels almost physical, a hunger to enlarge your radius, your faith, your definition of what your life is allowed to hold.

Find out more about the other midlife awakening transits from 36-42. Subscribe as a paid substacker below to read on.

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Paid subscribers get early (and full) access to new essays, occasional behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m working through & monthly live guest speaker interviews. I hope you enjoy this article.

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This past week I have noticed something.

Normally I am consistently tracking my eating and weight.

As someone that has lived with chronic health issues for the past decade and a half, I ensure everything I eat is biodynamic, organic, local, full of life force and treated respectfully. I have learned how to recover and feel good in body, as a baseline, through managing my diet and lifestyle and so when I eat something that sets me off, I really notice it.

Just recently, after three weeks in Europe, with no real routine around my health, I came back to Australia and fell into a total slump. I don’t really get away with weeks on end of no routine, no discipline around my eating and exercise now… it makes me feel horrible.

And because post-partum, I put on a LOT of weight because of high levels of cortisol from solo parenting (the first close-to-three-years) + running a business with a new born and minimal support… and because it took four years to lose that weight (I am still not back to my baseline, but don’t necessarily expect to be either, as I am now a Mother and have changed the shape of my life and body)… I now often worry about putting it all back on again, if I fall out of routine.

It wasn’t until May of last year, that I finally started to lose my cortisol weight. I had to take myself out of my life, over to India for 2 weeks of intese panchakarma treatment, in order to reset my metabolism. Nothing else was working.

It seems extreme… but when you have tried everything… intense physical exercise, diet changes, supplements… blah… you start to consider more extreme options.

And panchakarma itself isn’t necessarily extreme… but when you are a single mother, taking nearly three weeks out of your schedule, away from your child, to travel to India for medical intervention, does seem like a LOT. I know many women who would not have the same privlidge as I did.

But I am grateful I did, as it changed everything. I lost 8kg initially and then when I was back home, the weight continued to shed, because my metablolism was functioning normally again.

It also kicked all of my cravings. I no longer craved sugar or caffeine, because I was not trying to get fast tracked energy into my system, where I was depleted. And whilst I still drink caffeine, I have changed the way that I do it…and I am no longer reliant on it.

The past year, alongside that protocol, I have had advanced genomics testing, using my DNA to test to map my unique genetic blueprint — intolerances, predispositions and also propensity for certain health issues. I have gone through a complete gut health reset, alongside a naturopath and also by using Zencleanse + BlackStuff

These are my two favourite health products on the market. I personally take the Black Stuff capsules daily to keep my biome healthy, and do their ParaDetox once every 6 months. I LOVE their paradetox blend because it is gentle and it not only detoxifies the gastrointestinal tract, but it also flushes it with magnesium, so that you’re not holding onto the toxins in your bowel.

For the ZenCleanse, I do the Zenclease One cleanse once every 6 months, and also their forgive (or rainbox cleanse for deeper dive clearing work) for the liver / gallbladder pathways. This is because I have a tendency for poor / congested detoxification (ahem, sun, mercury, pluto conjunction + mars in Scorpio, which rules the detox pathways of the body) and liver stagnation. I often tell people to do this cleanse in Saggitarius season (sagg rules the liver).

If you would like to know which zencleanse products to purchase in particular, you can sign onto my yearly paid membership or to my founders plan and send me your chart and I can tell you which would be best to purchase / give you a personalised protocol.

And most importantly, I have developed discipline and routine around my health. Daily exercise, protocols for my design and feminine biology.

Replacing my morning coffee with tea rituals (I am talking really good root propogated loose leaf teas, not the tea bag kind that are often loaded with toxins) and not having coffee until after I have eaten (at least 20 minutes after so that it also does not stop the digestive process), so that my gut biome stays optimal.

Training compassionately — meeting myself where I am at and not trying to push myself to be somewhere I am not.

But not witholding or making excuses, either.

I have always been someone to live cyclically — I take my bleed off, and rest and dream.

Just this past week, something else happened.

I noticed I stopped tracking what I was eating / my weight.

Perhaps it was because I have been too consumed with the death of my pop lately, to notice. More important things are on the horizon.

Or maybe, I have just let go of control.

I have been ravenous, feasting for winter and feeling comfortable with the idea of having more weight on me. I think about bears and how they go through a phase of hyperphagia in winter, to increase their body reserves to keep them warm and to last them through winter. And whilst I am not exactly going into a slumber and hybernating in a cave over winter, it does feel grounding and give me a really deep sense of fullness to have a full rested belly, without the hypervigiliance of my own surveillance getting in the way.

Or maybe I am just in that phase of life where I have just finally settled into myself.

I am not sure, but either way, it feels good to have arrived here.

The first time I met him and he read for me, at the end of the session he asked me to hold onto a bag.

“What’s in the bag"?” he asked me.

I didn’t realise at the time, but he was testing me.

He could sense that I was a seer, and wanted to find out for himself.

This was before he knew… and before I had decided that he would be the one to teach me to read runes.

And it is not like I go around telling people about what I do. Mostly, I don’t want people to know, otherwise I find that often people start to treat me differently.

Anyway, I held the bag in my hands and closed my eyes.

All of a sudden, I was transported underwater, to Avalon.

“They’re stones from Avalon…” I said.

“Blue”

“But one is different… one is from somewhere else”

His jaw dropped.

He pulled out the stones. Four of them.

“These three stones — the blue ones — are from Glastonbury, yes” he said.

“And the fourth one, correct, is different. It was from Wales”

He looked at me intensely and said: “You know I have tested countless psychics about this, and none have ever got it correct, like you have”

My body shook inside.

I know that I have pinpoint accuracy with my inner sight… it has been proven time and time again by what I have seen in client’s body, that has been confirmed on imaging or with blood tests after my sessions.

But I am still always in awe… always. I hope I am always able to be humbled by my own gifts in this way… because, the moment I am not, they are likely to disappear. It happened to me once as a child (story for another time).

I have a few spaces for open Medical and Business Intuitive sessions still this coming August. You can book in to work with me, below.

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Don’t get me wrong — I was deeply sad. However, this grief that I felt, felt ancient.

He started visiting me in moments of silence and in my dreamscape, presenting himself to me as a hawk.

And he began to show me who he really was.

My pop was a reclus…

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In Human Design, your Incarnation Cross is built from four Gate activations — your Personality (conscious) Sun and Earth, and your Design (unconscious) Sun and Earth. The Personality Sun is calculated from your exact birth moment; the Design Sun is calculated from roughly eighty-eight days before that, the point at which your body first began to form. Together, these four Gates create the central theme of your chart — the story your whole life keeps circling back to, whether you’re conscious of it or not.

Ra Uru Hu, the system’s founder, described the Incarnation Cross as the job description of your aura — not what you do for a living, but what your presence does to the room simply by walking into it. Your Type and Strategy tell you how to move through decisions correctly. Your Cross tells you why you’re here at all.

Every Cross falls into one of three geometries, depending on how your Design axis sits in relation to your Personality axis:

Right Angle Crosses carry a personal destiny. Their purpose unfolds through your own direct experience, not through anyone else’s participation. Most people on Earth — anyone with a 1/3, 1/4, 2/4, 2/5, 3/5, 3/6, or 4/6 profile — carry one of these.

Left Angle Crosses carry a transpersonal destiny. Their purpose only completes itself in relationship — it has to be witnessed, exchanged, lived out in front of other people to mean anything. This is the geometry of profiles 5/1, 5/2, 6/2, and 6/3, and it’s the geometry my own Cross of Defiance belongs to.

Juxtaposition Crosses carry a fixed fate. There’s no personal or relational unfolding here — just a specific, stable theme that holds its shape no matter what. This is the rarest geometry, belonging only to the 4/1 profile.

Every Cross also belongs to one of four Quarters of the Mandala, depending on which season your Personality Sun Gate falls in — Initiation, Civilization, Duality, or Mutation. The Quarter colors everything: the same underlying four-Gate family will read differently depending on whether it’s showing up in the mind’s spring awakening or the body’s autumn bonding or the winter work of accepting an ending. That’s the design by which I have created the animal families below — sixteen four-Gate cores, each one taking a different seasonal coat as it moves through the wheel.

None of this is prescriptive. A Cross doesn’t tell you what to do — it isn’t a script you perform correctly or incorrectly. It’s closer to a theme that keeps surfacing in your life regardless of what you consciously choose, the way water finds the same low ground no matter how many times you redirect the flood.

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