I lost my business the month before my daughter was born.

Everything I had built — the income, the savings, the professional identity I had stitched together over years — gone.

The business sale that was meant to set me up to have maternity leave? The woman liquidated the business post sale and never paid me.

I was a single mother. No pension from the government. No way of making income at the time— unless I was to start another business, in my third trimester, right before I gave birth (which is what I ended up doing).

It would have been easier to have put her in Day Care or some kind of Facility, so that I could work predictable hours and have safety and stability to provide for myself from a resourced place.

But that was never an option for me, and I want to explain why.

And yes, I used the word Facility. Because I believe that we have softened it — we call them centres, rooms, nurseries — but a facility is what it is: a building staffed by rotating strangers where infants and toddlers are left, for eight to ten hours a day, in the most neurologically critical window of their entire lives.

I made it work to stay at home for the first three years of my daughters life, even though it was a fucking struggle. It cost me 20 kilograms, my health, years of recovery I am still inside of. And I would do every bit of it again.

Because what I understood — bone-deep — was that those first years were not a phase to be managed. They were the construction of a nervous system, an attachment system, a sense of self that would either hold my daughter or fail her for the rest of her life.

I chose to hold her myself.

What the Science Says: The Unfinished Brain & The Critical Window

The neuroscience here is not ambiguous, even if the cultural conversation pretends it is.

The human infant is born with the most underdeveloped brain of any mammal relative to adult brain size. This is not a design flaw — it is a design feature. The infant brain is meant to be completed in relationship. Specifically, in relationship with a primary caregiver who is attuned, consistent, and physically present.

Allan Schore, whose research on right-brain development and early attachment has spent thirty years documenting this, is unequivocal: the first two years of life represent a critical period for the development of the orbitofrontal cortex — the region responsible for emotional regulation, stress response, empathy, and the capacity for intimacy. This development does not happen in a vacuum. It happens through thousands of daily micromoments of attunement — a gaze held, a cry responded to, a nervous system co-regulated by another nervous system that is calm, known, and safe.

Ed Tronick’s still-face experiments made this visible in a way that is almost unbearable to watch. In the experiment, a mother who has been warmly responsive to her infant is asked, for just two minutes, to become still and expressionless. Within seconds, the baby begins to try to re-engage her — smiling, vocalising, pointing. When she does not respond, the infant escalates. Then withdraws. Then collapses into distress. The nervous system of an infant, encountering the unresponsive face of a caregiver, registers this as a threat equivalent to abandonment.

Two minutes.

Now consider what we ask of infants who spend eight hours a day with rotating staff in an under-resourced room with inadequate ratios, whose faces are not always calm, whose attention is divided, who will leave at the end of the month and be replaced by someone new.

The research on cortisol — the body’s primary stress hormone — is damning. Multiple studies, including the landmark NICHD Study of Early Child Care, have found elevated cortisol levels in infants and toddlers in group care settings, even in high-quality centres, particularly during the first two years. The developing stress response system, under chronic low-grade activation, does not self-correct. It calibrates. It builds a nervous system that is permanently tilted toward threat.

This is, I believe, the core tension we are seeing inside of Humanity right now — infantsalised adults — or, babies in adult bodies, constantly dysregulated and stressed, living lives that are braced and urgent.

The Empowerment Trap

Here is the story we have been told: women returning to work is liberation. The facility is the infrastructure of female freedom. To question it is to be regressive, anti-feminist, nostalgic for a patriarchal past in which women were trapped.

Women’s economic independence is not trivial. The ability to participate in professional life is something I am passionate about — it really matters. The structural conditions of capitalism — the absence of meaningful parental leave, the atomisation of family units, the erosion of the extended kin networks that once made maternal presence possible without maternal isolation — these underpin a woman’s ability to stay at home with their child in their first few years.

But somewhere in the translation, we made a catastrophic error of conflation. We confused women being free with infants being fine in facilities. These are not the same claim. One is about adult autonomy. The other is about infant neurobiology.

What I see, again and again, is that many women do not want to leave their infants. They grieve it. They spend the first weeks back at work suppressing the biological pull — the cortisol spikes in their own bodies when they cannot respond to their child’s cries, the milk that lets down at the sound of a baby crying on the train. Their bodies are telling them something that their politics will not allow them to hear.

The real failure here is not individual. It is systemic. We built an economic system that cannot accommodate the biological reality of human infancy, and then we told women the solution was to stop insisting on that reality.

What I Want to Say to Mothers

I am not here to punish anyone. I am not writing this to add to the enormous weight of guilt that mothers already carry in every direction. Most women who use early childcare are not doing so out of preference — they are doing so out of necessity. The economic coercion is real. The absence of support is real. I know what it costs to do otherwise. I paid it.

But I am tired of the silence.

I am tired of a culture that calls itself feminist and cannot have an honest conversation about what group care does to infants’ developing nervous systems. I am tired of the research being suppressed in polite company because it is inconvenient. I am tired of women who stayed home — who sacrificed careers, income, health, social capital — being made to feel that their choice was retrograde rather than what it actually was: a profound act of biological and relational intelligence.

And I want to name something that I observe in the mothers who did go back early and who did use facilities through those first years: the guilt is always there. Not always conscious. Sometimes it surfaces as a particular kind of compensatory permissiveness — an inability to hold limits with children who are acting out an unmet need for regulation. Sometimes it surfaces as resentment, at the child, at the choice, at the conditions that made the choice feel impossible.

The Communities Who Already Know

There is an irony in all of this that I cannot ignore.

The communities that have maintained infant-and-child-centred practices through modernisation — that have resisted the facility model, that have kept infants close and in arms and within extended family networks — are often the communities we in the West would classify as least resourced.

They are not least resourced in the ways that matter most.

And I share on this, because so often, people come to me and call me “privliged” for being able to stay at home to raise my daughter. And yet — it is the least privliged that are often raising their children in community, with very little resources.

They know something we have forgotten, or perhaps were never permitted to value: that the labour of being present with a small child is not the absence of contribution. It is the most consequential contribution a human being can make to the fabric of a future. It is the work of building people who will be capable of love, of attunement, of genuine relationship — not because they were optimally stimulated by a facility’s learning program, but because someone who knew them and loved them was there, day after day, to catch them when they collapsed, to meet their eyes when they looked up, to let their nervous system borrow from a regulated one until it could regulate itself.

The Hill

I will keep dying on this hill.

Not because I want to label the mothers who made different choices are bad mothers. Not because I am unaware of the structural forces that make this choice impossible for many. Not because I want to return to a world where women are economically dependent and socially confined.

But because I believe that the willingness to feel the density of the challenge — the fourth trimester, the first year, the second year, the grinding unglamorous work of being physically and emotionally available to a small person who needs you beyond what any job description has prepared you for — is not something to be optimised away. It is the most important role on the planet, and it needs to be named and treated as such.

And because I believe that what we have done, in the name of modernity and liberation, is ask infants to pay the price for a systemic issue that we are not willing to look at and address.

The infant cannot advocate for her/his self. They cannot tell you they is drowning in cortisol, that the rotating faces are disorienting her developing sense of self, that she needs you and not a facility.

They tell you with her body. In the way they cannot settle. With the rages and the clingy nights and the difficulties that arrive later, at school, in relationships, in her own body’s capacity to regulate.

I chose to listen before she had to speak.

I stayed.

And whilst it was the hardest thing I have ever done — I am proud of myself for enduring the challenge.

If this is a topic you are interested or passionate about, I dive into topics like these in my latest release, The MotherWild Revolution: Cultural Change through Generational Activism.

Purchase The MotherWild Revolution

We are told that fear is simply a lower vibration, a contraction, a signal that you have not yet arrived at the frequency of abundance, of God, of your highest self. We are told to choose love over fear — as if these were two doors on opposite ends of a hallway and you simply had to choose the right one.

But what I want to share with you here, is another perspective.

Sometimes the door to love is through the fear. And that in running from what frightens us, we are not ascending into love. We are simply abandoning ourselves in more flattering language.

The nervous system is not irrational. It is, in fact, one of the most sophisticated intelligence systems we carry — a somatic archive of everything that has threatened the organism, going back not just through this life but through the long ancestral corridor of all the lives that made yours possible. When fear arises, something in you is paying attention. Something in you is tracking a pattern, a threat vector, a resonance between what is happening now and what has happened before.

To immediately suppress that signal with a mantra — I choose love, I release fear, I am safe — is not healing. It is, in the clinical language of trauma theory, bypassing. It is the spiritual equivalent of turning off the smoke alarm because the sound is unpleasant.

The smoke may still be rising.

Your Brain Is Not Trying to Ruin You

The amygdala — the almond-shaped structure sitting deep in the limbic brain — has been catastrophically misrepresented in popular wellness culture. We are told it is our primitive, reptilian enemy. The thing to override. The noise to breathe through.

But the amygdala is a pattern-recognition organ of extraordinary sophistication. Its entire evolutionary purpose is to detect signals of threat before the conscious mind has processed them. It reads microexpressions, tone of voice, spatial proximity, energetic incongruence — and it sounds an alarm in milliseconds, far faster than the prefrontal cortex can construct a rational explanation.

This is the body being a better scientist than we are.

When fear arises — that tightening in the chest, the pooling cold in the belly, the sudden hypervigilance with no apparent cause — this is the amygdala. It has already done a rapid statistical analysis of the situation, cross-referenced it with your entire experiential archive, and concluded: something here matches a pattern associated with danger.

To immediately suppress that signal — I choose love, I release fear, I am safe — is not healing in all instances. As mentioned previously, it can be the equivalent of turning the smoke alarm off, when the house is on fire.

The Body Knows First

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent years studying patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for rational decision-making. What he found upended the Cartesian assumption that reason should govern emotion. Without access to somatic signals, to the felt sense of the body’s responses, these patients couldn’t make good decisions. They could reason perfectly. They simply couldn’t choose.

His somatic marker hypothesis proposes that the body’s emotional responses — including fear — function as rapid evaluative signals that guide judgment before conscious reasoning catches up. The body, in other words, is not the enemy of good thinking. The body is thinking.

Interoception — our capacity to perceive signals from inside the body — is now understood as central to self-awareness, emotional regulation, and social cognition. Research shows that people with higher interoceptive accuracy are better at reading their own emotional states, and better at reading others. The more attuned you are to what your body is doing, the more accurate your felt sense of a situation.

When we train ourselves to override interoceptive signals — to reframe fear before we have actually felt it, to bypass the body’s report in favour of a chosen emotional state — we are not becoming more spiritually evolved. We are becoming less intelligent. We are dimming one of our most precise instruments of perception.

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What Fear Actually Encodes

Here is something the fear-averse wellness discourse almost never acknowledges: fear memory is not random. It is not just accumulated anxiety looking for somewhere to land.

The neuroscience of fear conditioning tells us that fear responses are learned through association — that the brain links neutral stimuli to threatening outcomes through experience, and that these associations are stored in the amygdala with a specificity and durability that rational thought cannot easily reach. This is why trauma does not respond to logic. The fear is not a cognitive error. It is an encoded record of something that genuinely happened.

And here is the critical piece: that encoding carries information. The pattern the amygdala is tracking — the particular tone of voice, the specific dynamic, the way this person takes up space, the way this situation resembles that one — is not noise. It is data. Data gathered from lived experience, from relational history, from everything the body has survived.

Fear which has not been processed is not simply psychological distress. It is incomplete biological response. The body began a threat-response cycle — detected danger, began mobilising — and was unable to complete it. The fear that persists is the body still trying to finish what it started. Still trying to be heard.

The answer is not to silence it. The answer is to listen to it all the way through.

What is crucial to understand is that the nervous system does not move toward safety through suppression. It moves toward safety through co-regulation and completion. Through being witnessed. Through having the fear acknowledged rather than overridden.

When we perform fearlessness — when we insist that we have chosen love, that fear has no place here, that we are above the contraction — we are not signalling safety to our nervous system. We are creating a dissociation between our actual physiological state and our presented state. The body knows the difference. And chronic dissociation from one’s own fear response is, clinically, a risk factor for the very anxiety and emotional dysregulation the wellness practice is meant to resolve.

The paradox is this: in trying to transcend fear, we can cement it.

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Love Requires a Nervous System

Here is what the love-over-fear doctrine fundamentally misunderstands: love is not a cognitive decision or a vibrational frequency you maintain through discipline. Love is, neurologically, a state of regulated co-presence. It requires that you are actually here — in your body, in contact with your own interior states, available to genuine uncertainty.

Genuine intimacy activates the same threat-detection systems as danger does. To be truly seen is to be vulnerable. To love someone is to have something at stake. The nervous system does not distinguish cleanly between the risk of intimacy and the risk of threat — both require the same fundamental courage: to remain present with an uncertain outcome.

Fear, in this reading, is not always the enemy of love. Fear can be evidence that love is real. That something matters. That you have not managed yourself into such careful emotional distance that nothing can touch you.

The person who has transcended fear has not, in many cases, ascended into love. They have, neurologically speaking, moved into a kind of controlled dorsal vagal state — a managed flatness that feels like peace and functions like avoidance.

What the Descent Asks

To descend into fear is not to drown in it. This is not an argument for flooding, for overwhelm, for removing all the guardrails and calling it healing. The neuroscience of trauma-informed care is clear that the window of tolerance matters — that effective therapeutic work happens in the zone where the system is activated but not overwhelmed.

What is being asked here is this: that we develop a relationship with the fear rather than a policy toward it.

In somatic and neuroscientifically-informed practice, this looks like turning toward the body sensation with curiosity rather than urgency. Noticing where it lives. How large it is. What it is braced against. Asking — not metaphorically, but as a genuine act of interoceptive inquiry — what are you tracking? What have you noticed that I haven’t let myself know yet?

What emerges, consistently, in this kind of work, is not chaos. It is clarity. Specific, embodied, often precise clarity about something the surface self — the self committed to being loving, high-functioning, and spiritually evolved — was not yet able to receive.

This relationship is not safe. I have given more than I have received. Something in this situation is not what it appears to be. I have been here before, and I know how this ends.

The body has been trying to communicate these things. Fear was the signal. The nervous system had already processed what the mind was working very hard not to know.

The Intelligence We Keep Muting

We live in a culture that is deeply phobic of the body’s darker signals. We have constructed entire spiritual economies around the project of feeling good — of curating inner states toward the pleasant, the elevated, the loving. And within that economy, fear has become pathology. Evidence of insufficient healing. Proof that you haven’t done enough work.

But neuroscience does not support this. The neuroscience tells us that fear is one of the most information-dense signals the body produces. That the amygdala is not our enemy but our archivist. That interoceptive awareness — including awareness of uncomfortable states — is associated with greater emotional intelligence, better decision-making, and more genuine relational presence.

What would it mean to treat fear as data rather than failure?

To descend into it not as spiritual defeat but as an act of rigorous self-inquiry?

To ask the nervous system — which has been recording, correlating, and pattern-matching everything you have experienced across the whole span of your life — what it knows?

The descent is not the opposite of love. The descent, done with the right quality of attention, is love. It is the willingness to be present with what is actually happening inside you, rather than the experience you have decided you should be having.

And what the body reveals, when we finally stop overriding it, is rarely what we feared we would find.

It is, far more often, the truth we were ready to receive — waiting patiently in the dark, encoded in the very signal we were taught to silence.

Ever since Uranus finished it’s final cycle in Taurus and moved into Gemini, my body has been going into states of morphic shock — tremor, anxiety, restlessness, sleeplessness.

Normally when this happens, I drink some skullcap tea, have some milky oats — I really amp up my nervous system care. And I have been doing that. But, nothing has really been “working” which tells me… it’s something deeper.

During a somatic experiencing session, a couple of weeks ago, I descended into the feeling and I located it — it lived in my womb, my pelvis, my deep belly and my root.

It didn’t have much to say, per se; but a vision did arise when I allowed myself to be with the sensations. A snake arose through my spine and came and looked at me right in the eyes. It’s eyes were yellow. And when it looked at me, the tremoring stopped. My body rested.

I looked up the meaning of yellow eyed snakes — instinct. When a yellow eyed snake arises, your body is likely sensing something instinctual, that you don’t yet have language for. And that felt… right.

Four days after the sleeplessness, I got a phone call. It was from the man I had been seeing for some months— he called, telling me he had not slept for a few nights (the same amount of nights I had not slept for) and needed to talk.

He told me he could no longer have an intimate relationship with me — that feelings were developing (both sides) and it wasn’t fair to continute if we were not holding the vision of long term relationship. I agreed.

After the call, something in me sank and relaxed. My body eased a little. But part of me was still unsettled, unrested. I let myself integrate.

We were meant to catch up to say goodbye before I left (I leave in two days), but he never answered my call.

Yesterday, I had the instinct to drive past a certain shop, to get lunch. I dropped my sister off there — I had to duck home to give my mum the keys to get in the house.

My sister messaged me “ahhh, he’s here — but with another girl”

My belly sank. Rage started surging through my body. Every story imaginable ran through my mind.

As I drove back to pick my sister up, I messaged him “can you just be honest with me — if you’re seeing someone else, please let me know”.

He had told me he had no capacity to see anyone else… and didn’t want to.

Interestingly, a month beforehand, I had a flash of another woman in my vision, and I dismissed it.

But my instinctual animal body was showing me not to ignore it.

And with no message response from him, it is clear that I have the information now.

After a full night of body catharsis — shaking, rage, grief — soothed with some homeopathic remedies to allow me to stay centred within it all, I now feel like I’ve returned back to myself… my body rested.

Our instincts are not just “trauma responses” — they are our deepest knowing, beyond the minds interpretation of reality. My body knew, my reality just had to catch up.

Sigourney x

And the metric is this: how well do we love?

Not how much we feel. Feeling is easy. Feeling is the passive weather that comes and goes.

I mean how well we show up — in the moment when another person needs us to be larger than ourselves. How well we set down the heavy luggage of our own narrative and actually enter the room where someone else is standing.

By this measure, we are failing. We are failing in ways the data has been screaming at us for years, in ways that are now so ordinary we mistake them for the human condition.

They are not the human condition. They are a civilisational pathology. And I am tired. I am grieving. And I am angry.

The Numbers We Should Be Ashamed Of

In 2025, the American Psychological Association surveyed over 3,000 adults. They found that nearly seven in ten — 69% — said they needed more emotional support over the past year than they actually received.

There is a crisis of showing up. People surrounded by other people, drowning in plain sight.

More than half of those surveyed reported feeling isolated. Half reported feeling left out. Half said they lacked companionship.

Half.

This is not the data of a fringe population. This is the median experience of a modern adult life.

The US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. By early 2024, 30% of adults reported experiencing loneliness at least once a week. One in ten, every single day. And the loneliest of all — the demographic you might least expect — are the young. Adults aged 18 to 34. The most digitally connected generation in history. 79% of adults aged 18 to 24 report feeling lonely. They have more ways to reach people than any humans have ever had, and they have never been more alone.

We built infrastructure for contact and called it connection. We were wrong.

The Self That Cannot Step Aside

Here is where I need to say something harder, because the loneliness statistics are the wound, but I want to talk about the instrument of the wound.

We are a civilisation in love with ourselves.

Not in the healthy, boundaried, self-respectful way that the wellness industry has tried to sell us. I mean something older and sadder and more corrosive. I mean the kind of self-absorption that has been slowly rising in the data for decades, so normalised now that we barely notice it — like the water temperature rising around the frog.

In 1963, 12% of adolescents agreed with the statement “I am an important person.” By 1992, that figure had risen to between 77 and 80%. Narcissism scores on the standard psychological inventory rose 30% between 1979 and 2006 among American college students. By 2009, twice as many students answered the majority of questions in a narcissistic direction compared with their 1982 counterparts.

This is a cultural curriculum. Individualism, taught as virtue. Self-optimisation, sold as enlightenment. The language of our era is a language of the first person singular.

And here is the grief of it: you can love someone deeply and still be so occupied with the storyline of your own life — your wounds, your needs, your tiredness, your righteousness — that you simply are not there when they need you.

I am not speaking about narcissists in the clinical sense. I am speaking about all of us. About the way we half-listen because we are already composing our response. About the way we make someone else’s pain a supporting character in our own emotional narrative. About how we mistake self-awareness for presence and call it growth.

Self-awareness without the capacity to leave yourself is still just a more sophisticated form of self-obsession.

What We Do Instead of Showing Up

We have become extraordinarily creative at love’s simulacra.

We send the message. We react to the post. We ask how they are and are already scrolling before the answer arrives. We say “I’m here for you” and mean it — in the abstract, in the version of ourselves we prefer — but when the specific, inconvenient, poorly-timed moment of another person’s need arrives, we are busy. We are tired. We are processing our own things. We will circle back.

We have outsourced intimacy to performance and called it enough.

A 2024 study found that 72% of couples lack daily intimacy. Not physical intimacy specifically — intimacy in the full sense. The being-known-and-knowing. And it is not simply time that erodes this. Researchers found that emotional disconnection is cited as the primary cause in over 70% of cases of relational withdrawal. We are not absent because we are busy. We are absent because we have quietly forgotten how to be present.

The research on intimacy avoidance is meticulous in its despair. When shame is high — and it is high, it is extraordinarily high in a culture that monetises aspiration — the self-concealment, the perfectionism, the fear of being truly seen, compounds into patterns of avoidance that researchers describe as particularly damaging in close relationships. We protect ourselves from the intimacy we are dying for.

This is tragic. And it is everywhere.

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What Love Actually Requires

Love — not the feeling, but the act — requires something we have systematically under-developed: the capacity to make yourself temporarily smaller than another person’s need.

Not erased. Not martyred. Not pathologically self-abandoning. I am not speaking of the old wound-language of codependency. I am speaking of something precise and dignified: the moment of genuine self-transcendence in which you recognise that this, right now, is not about you, and you rise to meet it.

And this is practised. It is the thing that atrophies when it is never exercised, and the thing that deepens when it is brought to the mat, over and over, in the ordinary moments of ordinary relationships — the conversation you stay present for when you are exhausted, the grief you witness without rushing to resolve it, the need you meet when meeting it is inconvenient.

We have confused feeling love with doing love. And feelings, left to metabolise on their own, evaporate.

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The Elegy

I am not angry at people. I am angry at what we have made.

We made a world that rewards self-promotion and calls it confidence. That celebrates personal branding and calls it authenticity. That built a thousand platforms for performance and forgot to build a single one for witness.

We made a world where the deepest thing we can ask of another person — stay with me, be here, let my reality matter to you — has become somehow too much. Too needy. Too exposed. Where vulnerability is a podcast topic and an actual liability in lived relationship.

We measured our advancement in GDP and technological output and longevity statistics and the sheer volume of information we can transmit in a second.

We forgot to measure how well we love.

And by that measure — the only one that determines whether a life is actually livable — we have regressed.

This is the grief of our era. Not that we do not feel love. We feel it. We feel it intensely, in the private rooms of ourselves, for the people who matter to us.

We just cannot seem to get out of our own way long enough to deliver it.

This essay is part of The Soft Body Revolution — a Substack exploring the somatic, relational, and esoteric dimensions of what it means to be human.

By Sigourney Belle

Thrown off my centre by societies projections, of what it means to be a Single Mother… I forget… that the liberation that has come with choosing this path for myself.

Not that I chose it, entirely.

I mean, some part of me did. My soul knew the journey it was embarking on. However it did not FEEL like I chose it, when it was all unfolding within the throws of mess and early matrescence.

But now, having burst out of that early postpartum haze, I can see why I chose to walk this path. Lonely at times, sure. Harder than anything I could possibly imagine, sure.

However, there is actually also a sense of freedom in this path (for me, anyway) that is often not spoken about so much, publicly.

The kind that lives in the silence after your child falls asleep — when the house is yours, the decisions are yours, the direction of the life you are building belongs entirely to you.

But single motherhood, for those of us who have chosen it or grown into it or been cracked open by it into something we never expected to become — it is not the lesser thing. It is not the consolation prize.

It is the whole sky.

I know what you have been told.

That a family needs a particular shape to be real. That love requires a witness of a certain kind. That your child is missing something — some warmth, some anchor, some word that only another adult can provide.

I want to ask you: missing compared to what?

Compared to a household held together by the quiet performance of two people who have long since stopped seeing each other? Compared to a table where the air is thick with what cannot be said?

Your child is not missing anything. Your child is watching you be free.

And sure, I have moments where I break down. Where I need to be held. Where I struggle and long for the idealistic “happy family” narrative. And then I witness Mother’s who are dependent on their partners — or that have to run every decision by them and I think “no thankyou”.

There is a sovereignty that comes when you stop negotiating your life with someone who is not you.

When you cook what you want. When you take the trip. When you raise your daughter according to the values that live in your own bones — not diluted, not compromised, not routed through the approval of someone who sees the world differently.

And sure, I am a Single Parent, but I am also a part of a blended family — one full of colour, of flavours so rich that a nuclear family could not provide.

It does not work for everyone. It is not everyone’s path. However it was my own — and it is the path of many Mothers.

Single Motherhood can look like mothering from wholeness.

A woman who knows what she wants, and moves toward it — this is not deprivation. This is the most radical thing a child can witness.

Single mothers built civilisations.

They held land, raised sons into men and daughters into forces of nature, kept the knowledge, carried the lineage. They were called widows and spinsters and unfortunate and brave. They were called strong like it was an apology.

I am not calling you strong as an apology.

I am calling you complete.

To the mothers doing it alone on Mother’s Day:

You are not half of something. You are not waiting. You are not a before-picture.

Your home is not broken. It is whole in a different geometry.

The love in it does not divide by two — it multiplies, undiluted, unsplit, moving in one clear direction: toward your child, toward yourself, toward the life you are actually living instead of the one you were supposed to want.

The stigma belongs to a world that was never built for your kind of courage.

Leave it there.

Come into your life.

The whole sky is yours.

Happy Mother's Day.

With Love,

Sigourney Belle x

But there is an inverse derangement, equally severe, that goes uninterrogated because it dresses in civic virtue. It is the wholesale surrender of one’s own perceptual authority to institutional consensus. The reflexive deferral of intuition, embodied knowing, the felt sense of when something is off — onto the government, the science, the experts, the data. This person is rarely called delusional. They are called sensible. Mainstream. A “good citizen”, even.

But this is its own kind of derangement.

Because intuition is not a decorative add-on to human cognition. The felt sense is not superstition (although it most definitely CAN be if it is not being sourced from grounded wellbeing - a whole other topic, maybe for a part two). Intuition is part of the apparatus — a phylogenetically ancient instrument of discernment that predates language and outperforms it in domains language cannot reach. A nervous system trained to override its own signals in deference to external authority is a nervous system in a dissociative loop. It is the somatic correlate of learned helplessness, repackaged as maturity.

And the cultural reward structure is asymmetric. The one who trusts too much is called responsible, even when the trusted institutions betray that trust with stunning regularity. The opioid crisis. The food pyramid. Asbestos. Thalidomide. Tuskegee. The list is long, and it is ongoing. The one who trusts too little is called paranoid, even when the historical record repeatedly vindicates structural skepticism.

But here is what both poles share, and this is the part worth holding:

Both are abdications of the discerning function.

Total trust and total distrust are both lazy. Both refuse the harder labour of actually metabolising information through one’s own faculty. The conspiracy theorist outsources to the counter-narrative. The institutionalist outsources to the consensus narrative. Neither is thinking. Both are subscribing to a similar narrative (although they would hate to believe so).

The mature position is stranger, and lonelier.

I will read the studies, and I will read my body. I will weigh institutional incentives. I will notice when the felt sense and the official line diverge, and I will not automatically assume one is right. I will tolerate the ambiguity. I will stay in the discernment.

That last part is what most cannot do. It is uncomfortable. It requires a self that can hold complexity without collapsing into a side. It requires the willingness to be wrong, to revise, to remain a perceiving instrument rather than a parroting one.

The conspiracy theorist, at least, is still listening to something — even if to a fevered counter-current.

The fully institutionalised mind has stopped listening altogether. And calls this hearing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This year, something shifted.

I’ve decided not to outsource my nourishment to anyone else's memory or initiative. Not because I'm closed off to receiving — I'm not — but because I am done making my care contingent on someone else's capacity to give it.

So I ordered the organic cotton pyjamas I'd been eyeing for months. Soft, simple, mine. I found the slippers that made me feel like a woman who takes herself seriously. And I booked the treatment at the day spa — not as a reward for surviving, but as a baseline. As something I simply deserve because I exist and I give and I pour out, and that pouring needs a source.

There is something profoundly clarifying about deciding: I will not wait.

Not in resentment, nor resignation — but in sovereignty.

If you are a mother — of children, of ideas, of communities, of other people’s becoming — this is your permission slip, though you never needed one from me. Nourish yourself this week with the same tenderness you extend so freely to everyone else. Book the thing. Buy the thing. Rest. Eat slowly. Do less than you think you should.

You are not a resource. You are a person.

And people need to be replenished.

Happy Mother’s Day to every woman who is learning, slowly and on her own terms, to come home to herself. 🤍

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Image of myself with my daughter Caerulea, by Aleira Moon

But this synchrony is being severed.

Artificial light, screen exposure, and the electromagnetic rhythm of our devices are now starting to replace the moon as the primary entraining force for the female reproductive system.

Entrainment is the biological process by which internal rhythms synchronise with external cycles. The circadian clock — the master timekeeper housed in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus — is calibrated almost entirely by light. And the reproductive axis, the HPO axis (hypothalamus, pituitary, ovaries), is downstream of that clock. It listens to it. It takes its cues.

What happens when the cues become noise?

The average woman now spends more than seven hours a day looking at a screen. Blue light — the wavelength most aggressively suppressing melatonin — pours into her eyes from the moment she wakes to the moment she places the phone face-down on her nightstand. The pineal gland, which governs melatonin and has been called the body's "third eye" for its sensitivity to light-dark cycles, cannot distinguish this from daylight. It responds accordingly: melatonin suppressed, cortisol extended, the body held in a state of perpetual solar noon.

Melatonin is not simply a sleep hormone. It is a powerful antioxidant that concentrates in ovarian follicles and protects the oocyte during maturation. It modulates FSH and LH pulsatility. It communicates seasonal and circadian time to the entire reproductive system. When we chronically suppress melatonin through blue light exposure — particularly in the hours before sleep — we do not simply lose sleep quality. We interrupt one of the most ancient rhythmic conversations the body knows how to have.

The clinical consequences are beginning to surface in the data, even if medicine has not yet connected the dots. Menstrual irregularity. Anovulatory cycles. Worsening premenstrual syndrome. Escalating rates of endometriosis, PCOS, and unexplained infertility. Pelvic pain syndromes with no clear anatomical cause. Hypertonic pelvic floors. Dyspareunia. Vulvodynia.

These are not separate conditions. They are a constellation — a body chronically out of phase with itself, held in a stress-state it cannot complete, its reproductive intelligence scrambled by the wrong kind of light at the wrong time of day.

We have medicalised each symptom in isolation. We have not yet looked at the pattern.

There is also something less measurable and more devastating at work. The moon was never merely a light source. She was a relational field — a shared rhythm that synchronised women to one another, to the seasons, to the generative and the dark. Collective menstrual synchrony, the subject of long debate in the research literature, may have depended not on pheromones alone but on shared environmental cues: the same moonlight falling on bodies sleeping in proximity.

Now each woman is entrained to her own algorithm. Her phone pings at a different hour. Her Netflix queue ends at a different scene. Her cortisol peaks and crashes on a schedule written by engagement metrics, not by the waxing and waning of a celestial body. She is isolated inside her own artificial light environment — and her body is cycling to a rhythm no one else shares.

What would it mean to reclaim this? To treat light as medicine — or as its current incarnation, poison? To understand that the practice of darkness, of putting the phone away before the melatonin window, of sleeping in moonlight or in genuine dark, of knowing where you are in your cycle in relation to where the moon is — this is the oldest form of preventative pelvic health care we have ever had.

The epidemic of pelvic dysfunction we are living through has many causes. But at the root of so much of it is a body that has lost its relationship with time. Not chronological time. Cyclical time. The kind of time the moon keeps. The kind the female body was built to mirror.

We handed that mirror to our phones. And we are paying for it — in pain, in inflammation, in a reproductive intelligence that has gone dim for want of the dark.

If this landed somewhere in you — then this invitation is for you.

The Soft Body Method is a four-week journey designed to do exactly what this essay points toward: to clear the accumulated trauma and tension held in the pelvis, and to return you to the innate wisdom, fertility, and feminine fullness that was always yours.

In four weeks, you will move through shamanic and somatic work that speaks directly to the pelvic field — releasing the chronic holding, the bracing, the years of cycling out of rhythm — and begin the process of coming home to yourself at the deepest register. Working with Homeopathics, Herbs, Flower Essences and potent subtle energy work, you will return to yourself and your creative seat of power — fully — through our time together.

This is for the woman who feels the disconnection named in this essay. Who has watched her body struggle — with pain, with irregularity, with a fertility that feels dim — and has sensed that the answer is not another protocol, but a return.

The Soft Body Method starts this week.

I am only running it once. This is your invitation to join me.

Join me in The Soft Body Method

I have lived with chronic illness since I was a teenager. Once diagnosed as chronic fatigue, I now know that it is not really something to diagnose… it is, rather, just a part of who I am; sensitive, being born into a world that does not cater for my abilities and gifts. Many of us are this way — and we love to pathologise ourselves. I personally have never found this to be helpful… even when I have been given diagnoses, they have never sticked. I tend to think of myself more like a deciduous tree— one that does not fail in winter, but simply knows when to go inward.

Roots deep enough to have survived every stripping. Branches that have learned the wisdom of letting go — not as defeat, but as seasonal intelligence. I do not shed because something is wrong with me. I shed because I am built for cycles, not for the relentless performance of bloom.

The world was designed for the evergreen. Consistent, predictable, green in all seasons — always available, always producing, never asking to rest. But I am not that. I never was.

I am the tree that looks most barren at the moment it is doing its deepest work. Drawing down. Conserving. Listening to something older than productivity. The falling away is not loss — it is the tree’s great intelligence, redirecting life-force to what cannot be seen.

And come spring, I do not return apologetically. I return completely.

There is no diagnosis for that. There is no pathology in knowing your own nature. Some of us are simply wired for depth over duration, for intensity over consistency, for root-growth in the seasons when the world sees only bare branches and draws its conclusions.

I am not broken in my winters. I am becoming.

I have both lived and worked in this field for 15 years now.
Well, I have lived within it my entire life… but somehow it has become the purpose that I live and breathe, also.

Hypersensitivity. It is both a superpower and a curse, all at once.

My whole life, I have felt as though I want to run away and hide from the world, to withdraw from having any human contact and just to dance among the animate — to walk barefoot on the forest floors and swim in the salty seas. I spent my upbringing (mostly) living this way.

When I am living this way, I barely notice that I am not the “norm”

It isn’t until I am in bright lights, amongst loud noise, sitting in a cafe trying to write, that I often realise — wow, I am not coping.

This morning, it was lying on the pilates bed, watching me trying to attempt something in the most uncoordinated way possible. A reasonably simple movement that my body just couldn’t seem to grasp. They call this Apraxia: It's a neurological motor planning disorder — the brain has difficulty coordinating and sequencing the movements needed to perform intentional actions, even when the muscles themselves work fine. It's essentially a disconnect between intention and execution.

I know this, because I used to specialise in the diagnosing and treating of clients with neurological issues. And only more recently, I have discovered that Apraxia is also very common in neurodivergent people.

Where it shows up in neurodivergent populations:

Autism — Motor apraxia is quite prevalent, affecting things like gesture imitation, fine motor tasks, and sometimes speech. Many autistic individuals experience a significant gap between what they intend to do and what their body actually does, which has become an important area of advocacy (sometimes called the “intention-execution gap”).

ADHD — Dyspraxia (developmental coordination disorder, closely related to apraxia) is highly comorbid with ADHD, affecting motor planning, coordination, and sequencing of tasks.

Dyslexia/Dyscalculia — These sometimes co-occur with dyspraxia, which shares the same underlying motor planning difficulties.

Tourette syndrome and other tic disorders — Motor planning disruptions can be part of the picture.

Speech-specific apraxia (Childhood Apraxia of Speech / CAS) — This is particularly associated with autism, Down syndrome, and some genetic conditions like FOXP2 mutations.

For me, I have apraxia as well as dyslexia — neither of which really impact me unless I am joining something like a pilates class or dance class, where I often just simply struggle or even fail to be able to follow instructions to co-ordinate a sequence of movements. My mother even took me out of dance classes as a small child, because I could not get it right.

And then there are other days where I just cannot get out of bed and am too exhausted to even cook myself. These days are not few and far in between — this is a regular occurring experience for me. This is also where I dream. Where I incubate. It is where my prophecies communicate themselves to me — and so the exhaustion isn’t just simply exhaustion for the sake of it… it is revelation.

Living with this and also working with this, within my profession, as a Neurological Physiotherapist who has created a whole training company to support people like myself — highly sensitive, perceptive and gifted with extrasensory abilities — I have had to learn something that no textbook ever taught me: that the very thing the medical world wanted to fix in me was the instrument of my greatest work.

My nervous system is not dysregulated. It is finely tuned to frequencies that most practitioners simply cannot access. What reads as hypersensitivity on a clinical intake form is, in the treatment room, the thing that allows me to feel into a body before I have even touched it. To sense where the held grief lives in the thoracic spine. To know, without being told, that the pain in the hip is not about the hip at all.

I built my training company not despite this, but entirely because of it. Because I looked around at the landscape of Somatic Therapy work and I saw that there were no bodies of work that really bridged Somatics with Field work. The body has a field that surrounds it and the nervous system as receiver. The practitioner is an instrument.

And I knew that the people drawn to this work — the ones who felt too much in clinical settings, who burned out not from laziness but from an inability to switch off their perception, who were told they were too sensitive for this industry — they were not the problem. They were the most gifted healers in the room. They simply had no framework that honoured what they were.

So I built one.

This September, I have teamed up with some of the most gifted Medical Intuitive’s I know to present to you my training on Medical Mediumship, through the International Institite of Esoteric Medicine.

This training has been a long time coming. I have been practising this work specifically now for 10 years. I have been talking about creating it with my collaborators for about 2 of those years. And now it is time to bring it to life.

If you desire to be a part of the very first cohort of students, we are now taking applications and enrolments. We have a super early bird discount available currently, until June 1st. This work moves me deeply, and it is my deepest desire to share it with those that are ready to receive it.

Find out more / apply

It is truly rare that I feel like I can be alone, and also together with someone.

And when I meet someone like that, I let myself know that it is truly a gift — it means that the other person also knows how to be with themselves, too.

Companiable silence.

And then the opposite… you know that feeling… when someone is constantly reaching — into yours and other people's lives, minds, moods, and choices — I want to share more on this today.

Because I have been musing on how this phenomena springs forth because we cannot bear to be left alone with our own.

I. The unoccupied self

The person who cannot stop thinking about what you said last Tuesday. The friend who needs to process your relationship more than you do. The partner who tracks your emotional weather with the vigilance of a meteorologist. The spiritual teacher who always seems to know what's wrong with you.

What they share is not sensitivity. What they share is an unoccupied sense of self — a self that has not yet learned to furnish its own rooms.

When we are genuinely at home in ourselves, other people become interesting. When we are not, they become necessary. We require their drama to keep us from our own silence. We require their chaos, their healing, their patterns, their problems — because without an external focal point, we would have to turn and face the vast, uncomfortable spaciousness of our own unlived life.

Solitude is not loneliness. Solitude is what becomes available when you are no longer fleeing yourself.

II. Control is the costume of anxiety

We don’t usually think of ourselves as controlling people. We think of ourselves as caring. As involved. As emotionally intelligent — perhaps even gifted with insight into others.

But control is almost never announced. It arrives in the guise of help. Of wisdom. Of "I just feel like you need to hear this." Of advice dispensed without request. Of relentless inquiry into how someone else is doing, not because we are truly resourced to hold it, but because focusing on them keeps us from the discomfort of our own unprocessed experience.

To control another person's environment — their choices, their moods, their proximity, their narrative — is to manage our own anxiety through them. It is displacement. It is the psyche's oldest trick: project outward what we cannot metabolise within.

The person who cannot tolerate your silence will fill it. The person who cannot tolerate your autonomy will find a way to erode it, and often incrementally, with great “care” for your wellbeing. The person who cannot be alone will engineer your permanent availability — through guilt, through need, through the subtle accusation embedded in the question: why are you pulling away?

III. Colonisation begins at home

Jung understood that whatever we refuse to meet in ourselves, we will encounter in the world — in others, in fate, in the repeated structures of our relationships. The shadow does not disappear because we look away from it. It colonises our perception.

The person who cannot hold their own grief will be hypervigilant to yours. The person who cannot acknowledge their own rage will sniff it out everywhere they go. The person who is terrified of their own emptiness will be magnetised to people who seem full — and will drain them, systematically, while calling it love.

This is how psychic intrusion works at its most fundamental level: we colonise others because we have not yet claimed the territory of our own inner world and landscape. We haven’t become familiar with ourselves yet. And maybe we have never been taught to do this — because in the West, we are mostly taught to reach. We reach into their space because we have not learned to inhabit our own.

IV. The somatic signature

The body knows this. When someone is in your field who cannot be with themselves, you feel it as a quality of pull. A subtle pressure. Maybe you even feel anxiety yourself — like you cannot quite fully drop or relax into yourself. The sense that your presence is being consumed rather than met. That you are being used as a surface for someone else’s unprocessed experience to land on.

The nervous system is exquisitely sensitive to this quality of contact. We read it through co-regulation — or the failure of it. A truly regulated, internally resourced person in our presence creates safety. Their system has enough. It does not reach. It does not extract.

The intrusive system — however well-intentioned — creates a low-grade drain. A sense of needing to manage yourself in their company. Of performing okayness. Of bracing.

We have named codependency. We have named enmeshment. What we have not fully named is the somatic cost borne by the person being intruded upon — the low-level hypervigilance, the subtle collapse of self that happens when we are made into a regulation device for someone who refuses to do their own work.

V. The art

So what is the art of leaving people the fuck alone?

It begins with tolerating yourself. With learning to sit in your own discomfort long enough to realise it will not kill you. With developing what the contemplatives called equanimity — not indifference, but a stable ground that does not require constant rearranging of the outer world to feel okay.

It means asking, before you reach: Is this impulse arising from genuine care, or from my own unease? It means noticing when your interest in another person spikes — and turning that same curiosity back toward yourself. What does this stir in me? What am I avoiding looking at?

It means trusting that people are capable. That your unsolicited intervention is not rescue — it is noise. That your constant presence is not love — it is occupation.

True intimacy requires two sovereign beings who can also close the door. Who can be unreachable. Who can sit in their own rooms and be embraced by the quiet.

The most loving thing you can offer another person is often the radical act of leaving them alone — trusting them with their own experience, their own timing, their own unfolding.

And the most loving thing you can offer yourself is to stop outsourcing your inner life.

Come home. The vacancy inside you is not a problem to be solved by annexing someone else’s attention.

It is an invitation.

In particular, fem-firstborns like myself.
I want to see if my theory tracks…

My whole life I have had to journey a kind-of silence that lives between me and my mother. The silence of a deep feminine wound and projection; one that hums beneath every conversation, every glance. It has also felt like t…

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The irony would be funny if it weren't so costly. Because in the rush to signal spiritual sophistication — to be the person who has moved beyond the West, who bows to traditions older and more intact than their own — something real is being discarded. Something that belongs to them. They’re severing themselves at their roots.

What gets lost in this performance of decolonisation is the very thing it claims to honour: lineage. Rootedness. The responsibility to know where you actually come from — and what that place, for all its violence and contradiction, once knew.

The West Has it’s own Mystery Tradition. A Serious One.

The Western occult lineage is not a footnote. It is not a watered-down copy of something more authentic that exists elsewhere. It runs deep and it runs strange and it is breathtakingly rich.

We are talking about Hermeticism and its roots in Hellenistic Egypt. The Neoplatonism of Plotinus, who mapped the architecture of the soul with a precision that rivals anything in Vedantic literature. The Renaissance magi — Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno — who held that the cosmos was alive, ensouled, and radically participatory. The alchemical tradition, which was never merely about turning lead into gold but about the transformation of the self. The Kabbalah as it passed through Western hands. The Rosicrucians. The Grail mythos. William Blake, who built his own mythology because he refused to be enslaved by someone else's. Rudolf Steiner, Dion Fortune, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The British rune traditions. The living animism threaded through Celtic practice.

These are not peripheral figures or quaint relics. These are the architects of a living cosmological tradition that understood the body, the soul, the stars, and the invisible world as one continuous fabric of meaning.

“The West has not been without mystery. It has been without memory.”

Take Astrology — A Perfect Case Study

Western astrology is perhaps the most telling example of what I mean — and the most misunderstood. People who dismiss it as a Western construct, or who privilege Vedic astrology as the more “authentic” system, are missing something important about its actual history.

The roots of Western astrology are Babylonian, reaching back to Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE. The Babylonians developed the zodiac, mapped the planets, and understood that celestial patterns corresponded to earthly events. When Alexander the Great conquered Babylon in 331 BCE, that knowledge flooded into the Hellenistic world. In Alexandria — that extraordinary crucible where traditions collided and cross-pollinated — Babylonian astronomy merged with Greek philosophy and Egyptian cosmological knowledge. Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, written in the 2nd century CE, became the foundational text of Western astrology for over a thousand years.

"Then came the Islamic Golden Age. When access to classical knowledge contracted in Europe, Arab and Persian scholars — Al-Kindi, Abu Ma'shar — preserved it, vastly expanded it, and eventually it passed into European hands through the great translation movements of the 11th and 12th centuries. Europe was not recovering its own — it was receiving a multi-civilisational inheritance it had never solely owned.

Western astrology is therefore already a synthesis — Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Arab, Persian, and European thought in living conversation with one another across millennia. It belongs to the Western occult lineage precisely because the West was never sealed off from the East. It was always in dialogue. That is very different from abandoning your own roots in favour of borrowing someone else’s wholesale.

The Logic Doesn’t Hold

Let us examine the reasoning that drives so many Westerners away from their own lineage. It goes something like this: Christianity colonised the West and suppressed indigenous wisdom. Therefore, Western spiritual frameworks are corrupt. Therefore, I will seek elsewhere.

There is truth in the first premise. Christianity — particularly in its institutionalised, empire-adjacent forms — did suppress, absorb, and in many cases erase older ways of knowing in Europe. The witch trials, the destruction of the sacred groves: the severing was real and it was violent.

But here is what this reasoning skips: the mystery traditions were never fully extinguished. They encoded themselves in alchemical manuscripts and cathedral architecture and fairy stories and the symbolism of Tarot. They survived because they knew how to hide. And they have been waiting — patiently in the root systems of the Earth — for someone to come looking.

To reject the entire Western spiritual inheritance because of what the Church did to it is like refusing to learn your mother tongue because your grandmother was punished for speaking it. The oppression was real. But the language did not die. And refusing it does not heal anything — it simply continues the severance.

The Irony That Nobody Wants to Name

When a person from the West dismisses their own ancestral lineages as “too Christian” or “too patriarchal” or simply “not spiritual enough,” and then adopts Eastern practices wholesale — they are not decolonising. They are re-enacting the very colonial logic they claim to oppose.

They are still going to the East for what they believe the West cannot provide. They are still positioning non-Western traditions as the site of authentic spiritual currency, and the West as spiritually bankrupt — a land in need of import. The East remains exotic, romantically other, a resource to be mined for meaning. Only now, this extraction comes packaged with good intentions and a gratitude practice.

True decolonisation would look different. It would mean going back — not to the Church, but behind and beneath it. It would mean learning what your own ancestors knew about the body, the earth, the dead, and the invisible world. It would mean doing the harder work of recovering what was suppressed in your own lineage, rather than substituting someone else’s intact tradition for your own broken one.

The Cost of Root Severance

Jung understood something here. He was deeply cautious about Westerners adopting Eastern spiritual practices— he believed that when we sever ourselves from the symbolic inheritance of our own culture, that material does not disappear, it just becomes shadow.

What I see, working with people in the somatic and esoteric fields, is precisely this: a spiritual hunger that is real, reaching toward frameworks from cultures whose roots are still intact, because their own roots feel poisoned or simply lost. And I understand the impulse completely. But borrowed roots do not nourish in the same way. There is something in the soil of your own lineage — something in what your particular ancestors knew, suffered, encoded, and survived — that is available to you in a way nothing else can replicate.

Coming Home to a Complex Inheritance

I say all of this as someone who has had to reckon with this complexity in my own life. My roots are Chinese, Scottish, and English — three lineages, each with their own occulted depths, each with their own history of suppression and survival. I did not arrive at the Western mystery traditions by default. I arrived there through years of deliberate lineage work: sitting with what had been lost, walking the lands of my ancestors, tracing what had been hidden, and choosing — consciously — to reclaim what was mine to reclaim. The Hermetics. The British rune traditions. The older threads of Celtic practice that predate the Church’s reach — particularly, in the work I do with herbal medicine prescription and medical astrology.

That reclamation did not diminish my relationship to my Chinese ancestry or to the Eastern lineages I have studied deeply. It deepened it. Because when you are rooted in your own ground, you can meet another tradition as an equal — with genuine curiosity and respect — rather than as a refugee looking for somewhere to belong.

“You do not have to cross the world to find your roots. Sometimes you only have to descend.”

The Western mystery traditions are not asking you to be Christian. They are not asking you to be anything other than what you are — a soul with a lineage, standing with the inheritance that has been quietly waiting for you to come home.

The room is there. The door has always been unlocked. What has been missing is not access — it is the willingness to stop looking elsewhere long enough to go in.

Sigourney Belle Weldon writes at the intersection of esoteric theology, embodied medicine, and the Western mystery traditions. This essay is part of The Soft Body Revolution.

We know what Gisèle endured. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, systematically drugged and raped her for nearly a decade, inviting strangers into their home while she lay unconscious. She waived her right to anonymity. She insisted the trial remain public. She stood in front of the world and said: the shame belongs to the perpetrators, not to me. That was an incredibly brave and extraordinary act of courage.

But there is another woman in this story. Her daughter, Caroline Darian, who sat beside her mother in that courtroom, who had spent four years accompanying her through every unbearable revelation — and who, when she surfaced her own trauma, was allegedly met with the words: "Stop making a spectacle of yourself."

And then: “Your father is incapable of such a thing.”

Sit with that for a moment — how does that make you feel?

For me, my gut sinks when I hear these words, particularly coming from her Mother— and even more so, given the nature of what she had herself endured.

"For four years I accompanied my mum everywhere. I supported her without ever judging her. And it wasn't always easy because she didn't want to hear what I was telling her."
— Caroline Darian

What the psyche cannot hold

Trauma psychology has a concept called the window of tolerance — the bandwidth within which a person can process difficult information without collapsing into overwhelm or shutting down entirely. Gisèle's window, in those years, was already holding the near-impossible.

Her entire marital reality had been erased. Fifty years of shared life. The man she had breakfast with that morning. The father of her children. The person she had built a world with was revealed, in a single day, to be a systematic predator. The scope of what she had to metabolise — cognitively, somatically, relationally — was already total.

And then her daughter came to her and said: I think he did it to me too.

To receive that — to truly receive it — would have required Gisèle to expand her capacity for horror at the very moment when it was already at its absolute limit. It would have meant accepting that the betrayal went deeper still. That her daughter, too, had been harmed under her roof. That she had not only been a victim but, without her knowledge, an unwitting keeper of conditions in which another victim lived.

This is a description of a human psyche protecting itself from disintegration.

Disavowal: knowing and not knowing, simultaneously

What Gisèle demonstrated is something psychoanalysis calls disavowal — a more sophisticated defence than simple denial. Denial says: this is not true. Disavowal says: I know this is true, and I will act as though it is not.

It is the split that occurs when the truth is both known and unbearable. The psyche holds the knowledge at arm’s length, allows it to exist somewhere in the background, and simultaneously refuses to let it become conscious reality. It is an act of psychic survival, not an act of cruelty — even when, from the outside, it functions as both.

For Caroline, her mother’s disavowal was deeply wounding precisely because of the intimacy of it. She had been her mother’s witness. She had sat with the unbearable. And when she needed that same witnessing returned, it was withheld — not by a stranger, but by the person she had given herself to most completely.

“My mother let go of my hand in that courtroom. She abandoned me.”

What disavowal costs the one who practises it

There is a tendency to frame disavowal as a kind of protection — and it is. But protection always has a price. What Gisèle could not let herself know did not disappear — it was just buried. And what is buried in the psyche does not rest quietly. It pressurises. It shapes behaviour from below the threshold of awareness. It finds expression in the very dismissals she offered her daughter — stop making a spectacle of yourself — words that carry the force of something being held back, not simply something being said.

Jung called this the shadow; the shadow being the sum of everything the conscious self cannot integrate. In Gisèle’s case, the shadow held the possibility that the man she had loved for fifty years had violated not only her body but her daughter’s. That the home she had kept was a site of harm she had not seen. The shadow held her own complicity — not moral complicity, but the unbearable proximity of it. That knowledge, unmetabolised, became what she turned against Caroline.

This is one of the shadow’s cruelest mechanics: we most fiercely reject in others what we cannot bear to see in ourselves. Gisèle could not afford to witness Caroline’s truth because to witness it was to integrate her own. And so Caroline became — in the logic of the unconscious — a threat to be silenced rather than a daughter to be held.

The mother-daughter wound

In Jungian psychology, the mother-daughter relationship carries a particular archetypal weight. It is the original mirror. The first place a daughter learns whether her experience is real, whether her body can be trusted, whether she will be believed when she speaks from the depths of herself.

When that mirror fails — when the mother cannot reflect the daughter’s truth back to her — the wound is not simply emotional. It is ontological. It touches the daughter’s sense of what is real. Caroline had already been violated by her father. And then she was disbelieved by her mother. The two wounds work in terrible concert: the first said your body is not your own, and the second said your experience does not exist.

What makes this rupture so specific to the mother-daughter bond is the history of devotion that preceded it. Caroline had spent four years as Gisèle’s witness — accompanying her, supporting her, holding her pain without judgment. She had, in a very real sense, mothered her mother through the unsurvivable. And when she finally needed that reciprocated, the well was dry. She became self-protective in ways that look, from the outside, like abandonment.

What it takes to finally let the truth in

Jung wrote that we cannot transform what we will not face. The integration of shadow material is not an intellectual exercise — it is a somatic, relational, often shattering process. It requires, first, that the psyche develop enough capacity to hold what it previously could not. That capacity is rarely built in crisis. It is built in the aftermath, in the slow return to something like safety, in the presence of witnesses who do not need you to be coherent.

Something in Gisèle appears to be shifting. She has spoken of nagging doubt. Of reaching back toward her daughter. The phone calls — first at Christmas, then on Caroline’s birthday — are small, but they are not nothing. Her memoir names the photographs taken of Caroline as carrying an “unbearable incestuous gaze” — this appears to be the language of someone who has begun, at last, to let the knowledge in.

This is what shadow integration looks like in practice. Often it is not a clean admission, but a slow, costly opening — the psyche expanding, millimetre by millimetre, toward what it once had to refuse. It is a slow titration to be able to hold truth.

For Caroline, who has lived for six years in the particular hell of being certain without proof, waiting for her mother’s acknowledgment may have been its own form of witness. The body that carries a truth no one will confirm is a body in a kind of solitary confinement. To be believed — even partially, even belatedly — is not resolution. But it is the beginning of being able to breathe.

Published in The Soft Body Revolution · Written by Sigourney Belle Weldon

Not as a clinical or anatomical “structure” as most will treat it. But instead, as a place. One that most women have spent their lives walking past, managing, or learning very early on not to trust.

This didn’t happen by accident. It happened over a very long time, through forces so layered and so normalised that most of us inherited the wound without ever seeing the knife.

Early religion

Before the Church moved through Europe, women were the keepers of earth medicine, of blood rites, of the sacred cycles of the body. The pelvis was not shameful — it was oracular. The systematic dismantling of the old ways, the burning of the wise women, the replacement of the goddess with a virgin, did not just change theology. It severed women from the ground of their own power. That severance is still in us.

The Church & the body

For centuries, the female body was cast as the site of temptation, of original sin, of something requiring management and containment. Eros was not sacred — it was dangerous. Desire was not intelligence — it was weakness. A woman who lived fully in her body, who trusted her own instincts, who claimed her pleasure, was a problem to be corrected. We have been carrying that correction ever since.

The feminist era

And then came the hard-won fight for equality — which asked women, necessarily and understandably, to prove themselves in a world built by and for men. To lead with the mind. To achieve. To produce. To be taken seriously, women learned to live above the neck. The body, the womb, the erotic intelligence of the lower centres — these became liabilities. We gained so much — and yet, without meaning to, we left something behind.

These are not ancient wounds with no living trace. They are in the nervous system. In the way a woman holds her breath at the base of her belly. In the chronic tightening of the pelvic floor. In the inability to feel pleasure without guilt, or to rest without the sensation of falling behind.

In fifteen years of clinical and sacred practice — working with women’s bodies as a womens health physiotherapist, as a medical intuitive, through somatic and shamanic lineages — it is my experience that most women arrive in my clinic spaces, disconnected to this internal space. Even those that have done a lot of “feminine work” on themselves. And ironically it is often not more “work” that needs to be done here — but rather, a downward descent of energy and a connection to ones deep well and source of yin.

That teaching lives in the tissue. It passes through bloodlines. And it shows up, eventually, as something in the body that can no longer be ignored.

The loss of connection to the pelvic bowl shows up in ways we often don’t connect back to their source: in exhaustion that has no clear cause, in creative blocks, in fertility challenges, in pelvic pain that medicine cannot explain, in a flatness where aliveness used to be.

The Soft Body Method is four weeks of going there. Directly. Gently. With ceremony, with somatic and shamanic precision and with the kind of attention this part of the body has rarely received — because we work into both the somatic layers, but also the etheric and subtle bodies where lineage tension, karmas and curses are held — those that cannot be seen by ordinary eyes.

The Soft Body Method

• 4 weeks beginning 8 May with Sigourney Belle

• A somatic and shamanic journey into the female pelvis

• Working with soul fragmentation and lineage karma held in the pelvic bowl

• Reclaiming sexual and creative eros as a living force

• 12 women only — intimate, unhurried, deeply held

An invitation to the Soft Body Method — 4 weeks, 12 women, beginning 8 May

This container will only be held once this year. No guarantees it will happen again.

Find out more / reserve your place

It went something like this: girls and boys receive the same love in early childhood. Therefore the argument about differential emotional development doesn't stand. It must be a Y chromosome issue. Men are simply, biologically, less emotional.

I felt to address this comment directly with another essay, because this belief is so widespread, so deeply embedded in our cultural assumptions about gender, that it functions as a kind of thought-stopper. And the inquiry, I would argue, is one of the most important ones we can be having right now.

So let me do something I think is worth doing: take the biological argument seriously. Give you a balanced viewpoint — the pros and cons for the argument that violence is a “Y chromosone issue” and then show you why, even on its own terms, it just doesn’t hold.

I. The Case for Biology — Steelmanned

Before I dismantle this argument, I want to let you know that biology is not irrelevant here. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not reading the literature carefully.

The effects of testosterone on emotional expression (or the lack thereof) are very valid. The hormone appears to suppress the communication of vulnerability-related emotions — fear, sadness, the softer registers of distress. This is reasonably well-established. Oestrogen, conversely, enhances sensitivity to oxytocin, the bonding hormone, which may make emotional states more readily accessible and expressible in females.

Neuroimaging research shows that while male amygdala activity responds robustly to emotional stimuli, it shows weaker connectivity to the prefrontal regions responsible for verbal processing and emotional articulation. The architecture, in other words, may be wired somewhat differently — not deficient, but differently connected.

And there is an evolutionary argument available too: that male emotional containment served adaptive purposes in contexts requiring threat response, risk tolerance, and social hierarchies built on projected strength.

If you wanted to build the strongest possible case for the Y chromosome hypothesis, this is where you would stand; and it is not a trivial position. It has genuine evidence behind it.

But here is where it begins to unravel.

II. Culture amplidies or dampens biology dramatically

The most defensible position — the one that takes all the evidence seriously, including the biological evidence — is this: biology and culture interact. Biology may create certain tendencies. Culture amplifies or dampens them dramatically.

The chromosomal determinism argument — the claim that male emotional unavailability is primarily genetic, fixed, and pre-social — is not supported by the evidence. And the reason it isn't supported is that the evidence keeps pointing in the wrong direction for it.

Here is what the data actually shows, and where the chromosomal model runs into serious trouble.

III. The Developmental Reversal — The Hardest Evidence to Argue Against

If the Y chromosome produced emotional blunting, you would expect to see it from birth. From before birth, even. The chromosome is present from conception. Its effects, if primary, should be visible immediately.

They are not.

Weinberg et al. (1999) found that at six months of age, male infants display greater emotional reactivity, more positive and negative affect, and more difficulty with self-regulation than female infants of the same age.

Boys, before socialisation takes hold, are the more emotionally reactive sex. More easily distressed. More intense. More difficult to regulate.

And this is not just a marginal finding — it is well-replicated.

Because what the data shows is not a biology that produces emotional blunting. It shows a biology that produces emotional sensitivity — followed by a culture that systematically closes it down.

The reversal — from more reactive to less expressive — does not happen at birth. It happens gradually, across the first years of life, in direct correlation with the onset of gendered socialisation. That timing is not consistent with a chromosomal explanation. It is entirely consistent with a socialisation one.

IV. The Cross-Cultural Problem

The chromosomal argument has a second serious problem: culture.

If male emotional unavailability were primarily driven by the Y chromosome, we would expect to see roughly consistent patterns of male emotional expression across human societies. Chromosomes do not vary meaningfully between cultures. Socialisation does — enormously.

Fischer and Manstead (2000), reviewing emotional expression across cultures, found that gender differences in emotional expressivity vary dramatically between societies. Cultures with less rigid gender stratification show significantly smaller gaps in emotional expression between men and women. In some cultural contexts, male emotional expressivity is not meaningfully different from female expressivity at all.

The chromosomal model cannot account for this variation, but a socialisation model can.

There is also the historical dimension. The weeping heroes of Homer. The romantic expressiveness of eighteenth century men. The tight stoicism that became the dominant masculine ideal in the industrial era and has only recently begun to shift. The Y chromosome did not change between Homer and the Victorian mill owner. The culture did.

What varies across time and place is not the chromosome. It is the permission.

V. We Do Not Parent Boys and Girls the same

The comment that opened this essay rested on a premise I want to examine carefully: that boys and girls receive the same love in early childhood.

I do not doubt that most parents love their sons and daughters with equal depth and intention. But love and socialisation are not the same thing. And the research on parent-infant interaction is unambiguous: we do not parent gender-neutrally, even when we believe we do. Even when we are actively trying to.

Judy Dunn, Ian Bretherton, and Penny Munn (1987) observed mother-child conversations and found that mothers used significantly more emotion words with daughters than sons — in children as young as eighteen months. Long before a child can understand gender norms. Long before any conscious instruction has been given.

Fivush, Brotman, Buckner and Goodman (2000) found that when mothers discussed past emotional events with their children, they used more emotional content and more elaborative language with daughters. And crucially: they were more likely to sit with sadness with girls — to name it, explore it, stay with it. With boys, they were more likely to redirect, resolve, and move past it.

Tronick and Cohn (1989) found that mothers were more contingently responsive to daughters' emotional signals than sons' — meaning girls received more precisely attuned responses to their emotional states from very early infancy.

The message delivered to boys is not delivered in words. It is delivered in the micro-texture of daily interaction. In how long a mother stays with distress before redirecting. In whether emotional experience is treated as something to move toward, or away from. In whether a child learns: your feelings are real, nameable, and worth attending to — or learns, without ever being told, that the answer to that question is conditional on their sex.

The conditioning is so early, and so ambient, that it feels like nature. It is not.

VI. What Testosterone Actually Does — and Doesn't Do

Let me return to testosterone, because this is where the biological argument is most legitimate — and where it is most frequently misread.

Testosterone does appear to suppress the communication of vulnerability-related emotions. This is real. But — and this is the critical distinction — it does not appear to suppress the underlying emotional experience.

When researchers measure emotional responses physiologically — heart rate variability, cortisol levels, skin conductance — rather than through self-report, males often show equivalent or greater autonomic arousal than females in response to emotional stimuli. The body is reacting fully. What changes is the likelihood of expressing or articulating that reaction.

This means we are not looking at a deficit in emotional experience. We are looking at a disconnection between experience and expression. The feeling is there. The permission — or the architecture — to show it, is not.

Testosterone contributes to that disconnection. But it does not create it per se. And crucially: the socialisation data shows that the disconnection is being actively reinforced — by differential parenting, by emotional redirection, by the small signals that tell a boy his emotional life and expressions are less available for public expression than his sister's — from the very first year of life.

Biology and culture are working in the same direction. But culture is doing more of the work than we have been willing to admit.

VII. The Cost of Believing the Wrong Story

When we locate the origin of male emotional shutdown in the Y chromosome, we do several things simultaneously, all of them damaging.

We absolve culture of responsibility. If men are simply built this way, there is nothing to examine in how we raise boys, nothing to change in the micro-interactions of infancy that the research tells us are shaping the emotional brain in real time.

We close off the possibility of change. Chromosomes are not available to intervention. Socialisation is.

And we deliver the story to boys themselves — who absorb it, and in absorbing it, are given permission to stop reaching for the tools they were never given in the first place.

The grim statistics on male suicide, addiction, loneliness, and violence are not the statistics of a sex that feels too little. They are the statistics of a sex that was taught to feel in isolation — without language, without permission, without the relational scaffolding to process what was happening inside.

Many men are not emotional deserts. They are emotional oceans: contained, pressurised, difficult to read from the surface. But not empty.

The research tells us this. The developmental data tells us this. The physiological evidence tells us this.

The Y chromosome does not produce emotional unavailability.

Culture does. And it begins in the first year of life.

Further Reading

This essay is a companion piece to Motherless — on the rape academy investigation, early attachment, and the root of systemic violence — and to We’ve Been Reading Men’s Emotions Wrong. Both are linked below.

Read Motherless here

Read We’ve Been Reading Men’s Emotions Wrong here

The MotherWild Revolution goes deeper into the neuroscience of early attachment, the postpartum window, and why the way we receive infants into the world is the most radical act of social change available to us.

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What if we’ve been locating it in the wrong layer of the human being entirely?

What if the most enduring transmission of patriarchy isn’t happening in the mind at all, but in the body — before language, before reasoning, in the pre-verbal architecture of the nervous system itself? What if it is being passed not through argument or instruction, but through the felt quality of early relationship, through the subtle instruction of what is safe to feel and what must be suppressed, through the inherited tonal register of the male body across generations?

The science now supports what somatic practitioners and depth psychologists have long intuited: that the body is not a blank slate. It arrives pre-shaped — by lineage, by epigenetic imprinting, by the emotional atmosphere of the womb and the relational field of early life. If trauma can be inherited, if fear responses can be passed down through generations, then the question we must sit with is this: why not belief?

Epigenetics and the Body That Remembers

The research of Rachel Yehuda on Holocaust survivors and their descendants has fundamentally shifted our understanding of what the body inherits. Yehuda found measurable epigenetic changes — alterations in stress hormone regulation, modified gene expression — in the children of survivors who had never experienced the Holocaust themselves. The nervous system, it turns out, is a living archive. It records not only what happened to us, but what happened to those who came before us — and it passes those recordings forward, written into the very chemistry of our cells.

This work has since been extended and replicated across other populations and other traumas. What emerges consistently is the same extraordinary finding: that the physiological imprint of an experience does not necessarily end with the person who had it. It can travel — through the germline, through the epigenome, through the quality of early caregiving that is itself shaped by unresolved stress — into the bodies of children and grandchildren who never lived through the original event.

This inheritance is a predisposition — a shaping of the soil before the seed is planted. And if the soil has been conditioned for thousands of years by a particular relational arrangement — one in which women are property, vulnerability is weakness, emotional expression is danger, and dominance is the masculine birthright — then we must ask seriously: what nervous system does a boy inherit when he is born into that lineage?

What stress hormones are already slightly elevated? What threat-detection systems are already calibrated toward certain kinds of relational dynamics? What body-template is he handed, before a single word about gender has ever been spoken to him?

“The body doesn’t lie. It carries what the mind has long since learned to suppress, justify, or simply never question.”

Embodied Belief — The Tonal Body

Beliefs are not merely cognitive events. They are somatic states — tonal, textural, felt in the tissues before they are articulated in thought. A belief like “I am owed” or “her autonomy is a threat to mine” doesn’t only live as a thought. It organises the body: the set of the jaw, the bracing in the chest, the quality of the gaze, the chronic readiness to dominate or defend. It shapes breath, posture, the way a man enters a room, the way he responds when he does not get what he expects.

Through mirroring, attachment patterning, and nervous system co-regulation, boys do not just inherit ideas about gender — they inherit the body-felt texture of those ideas. They inherit the muscular tension of a father who never learned to be wrong. The controlled stillness of a grandfather for whom emotion was a private catastrophe. The particular flavour of danger that lives in proximity to female feeling, female desire, female refusal.

Watch a young boy absorb the relational dynamic between his parents. Watch him register how emotion is handled, how women are spoken about, how his own softness is received. Watch what happens in his body when he cries and is told to stop. When he reaches for tenderness and is met with correction. When he learns, slowly, that certain parts of himself are not welcome here.

He is not merely observing. He is entraining. His nervous system is taking notes in the only language it knows: tension and release, safety and threat, expansion and collapse. And those notes become the ground tone of his relational life — the felt sense of what intimacy means, what women mean, what he is permitted to need and what he must never show.

This is how patriarchy becomes somatic. Not through a single moment of instruction, but through the accumulated relational weather of a childhood — ten thousand micro-moments that together compose a body-belief about what it means to be a man in relation to a woman.

The Shadow in the Body — A Jungian Frame

Carl Jung understood the shadow not as something we choose to carry, but as something we are forced to exile. The parts of the self that cannot be integrated — that are too vulnerable, too tender, too complex for the psychological container we inherit — are pushed underground. They do not disappear. They go into the body. They organise in the unconscious. And they return, with interest, in our behaviour toward others.

For boys raised within patriarchal systems, the exiled material is enormous. The full range of emotional aliveness — grief, fear, longing, tenderness, the desire to be held, the capacity to be moved — is systematically split off and disowned. Not because boys do not feel these things, but because they are taught, in the most visceral and embodied ways, that feeling them is incompatible with being a man.

What gets projected outward — onto women, onto any other who carries the disowned softness — is the shadow of that original exile. The contempt for female vulnerability is often, at its root, a contempt for one’s own. The need to control is often a defence against the terror of one’s own uncontrollable interiority. The rage at female autonomy can carry, beneath it, the grief of a boy who was never autonomous in relation to his own emotional life.

This is not to render male violence as merely a psychological puzzle to be sympathetically decoded. It is to trace the full architecture of a pattern — because architecture, unlike character, can be rebuilt.

The First Wound — Severance from the Interior

What patriarchy does, before it produces a man who harms others (and in this case, we are talking explicitly about abuse towards women), is produce a boy who has been harmed. The particular wound is a severance — from emotional aliveness, from vulnerability, from the full spectrum of interior experience. Bell hooks, in The Will to Change, argues with devastating clarity that patriarchy’s first violence is done to boys: the demand that they excise tenderness, that they perform imperviousness, that they learn to equate their worth with control and their safety with the suppression of need.

This is the wound that is usually not directly named as a wound. It presents as strength. It is rewarded, celebrated, inducted. The boy who does not cry at the funeral, who does not flinch at the injury, who learns to laugh at his own longing — he is told he is becoming a man. What he is actually becoming is someone who has learned to live at a great distance from himself.

The abuse that later emerges toward women is, in many cases, downstream of this original dissociation. The boy who was never permitted to be held in his grief becomes the man who cannot tolerate it in another. The boy who learned that his interior was shameful becomes the man who must manage, diminish, or escape the interiority of those close to him. The dominance outward is often a misdirected search for what was lost inward — an attempt to master in the relational field what cannot be faced in ones inner world.

The Transmission We Don’t Talk About

There is one more dimension to this that we rarely point out directly: the role of the mother, not as cause of the wound, but as the first mirror. I wrote a whole post about this recently — it is called Motherless — you can read it here.

Boys learn something crucial in their earliest relationship with their mothers — or with whoever holds the primary caregiving role. They learn whether emotional need is safe. Whether closeness leads to engulfment or to genuine meeting. Whether the feminine is a force to be merged with, feared, or eventually managed. This learning is entirely pre-cognitive. It happens in the body and in the quality of being held or not held, seen or not seen.

When those early experiences are marked by unresolved anxiety, by mothers who could not be fully present because their own nervous systems were shaped by the same patriarchal inheritance — by generations of women who learned to contract, to suppress, to make themselves small — then the transmission continues through the mother-line too. Not as blame. As biology meeting biography, in the place where the two cannot be separated.

What this tells us is that the healing of this pattern is not only men’s work. It is collective work. It requires that we take seriously the intergenerational nature of what has been passed down — in both directions, through both lineages — and commit to interrupting that transmission at every level we are able to reach.

Inheritance Is Not Destiny

Here is where the framework becomes generative rather than merely diagnostic. The same neuroplasticity that encodes the wound encodes the healing. Epigenetic changes are not permanent inscriptions — they are responsive, living, capable of modification in the presence of new relational experience. The body that learned one way of being in the world can, with the right conditions, learn another.

Secure attachment experiences, somatic work, depth psychological inquiry, conscious masculine initiation — these are not merely therapeutic interventions — they create new neural pathways. They alter gene expression. They rewrite the template at the level where the template was first composed: the body, in relationship.

This is why somatic work is not supplementary to the project of addressing male violence and patriarchal conditioning. It is central to it. You cannot think your way out of a body-belief. You cannot cognitively override a pattern that was never cognitive to begin with. The re-patterning must happen where the original patterning happened — in the felt experience of the body, in the quality of relational contact, in the slow accumulation of new experiences of what it is safe to feel, what is safe to need, what it means to be held in one’s full humanity rather than required to perform an impoverished fragment of it.

“The question is not only what did he do — but where does this pattern live in his body, and what does it need in order to complete?”

What this asks of us — practitioners, partners, mothers, fathers, communities — is a willingness to hold two truths simultaneously: that the harm caused by men conditioned in patriarchy is real, serious, and must be named clearly — and that the site of transformation is the body, not merely the belief system. These truths do not cancel each other. They require each other.

A Different Kind of Accountability

True accountability requires understanding the full internal structure and layout of a behaviour — its roots, its medium, its transmission. Because a pattern that is only condemned, without being understood, tends to be driven further underground, where it becomes more dangerous, not less.

The deeper work — the work that actually changes things — is helping men find their way back to the places they were exiled from in boyhood. Back to the grief they were not permitted to feel. Back to the tenderness they learned to armour over. Back to the parts of themselves they split off in order to survive a world that told them wholeness was weakness.

When a man can feel his own fear without needing to manage it through dominance, the dynamic shifts. When he can be present to another’s pain without needing to fix, dismiss, or escape it, the dynamic shifts. When the body is no longer organised around the suppression of its own aliveness, what emerges in relationship is not control — it is contact.

This is what is at stake. Not just the safety of women — though that is urgent and non-negotiable — but the recovery of a wholeness that patriarchy has cost everyone. Men and women alike are living in the aftermath of a very long severance. The nervous system has been carrying this message across fathers, grandfathers, lineages of silenced boys, for a very long time.

It is time to listen differently. To go below the ideology, below the argument, below the carefully maintained surface — and meet what is actually living in the body.

That is where the wound is. That is where the healing begins.

Sigourney Belle Weldon is a senior neurological and womens health physiotherapist, medical intuitive, and founder of SOMAMYSTICA® — a global practitioner training body with over 10,000 trained practitioners. She writes at the intersection of clinical biophysics, esoteric medicine, and depth psychology. Her work integrates somatic trauma resolution, Jungian frameworks, and Eastern medicine lineages into a coherent map for human transformation.

It has always perplexed me.

When I try to live outside of my body awareness, something deep inside of me revolts — like I have no choice but to maintain a life that leads body-first, attuned to the sensitivity of my own architecture and the environment around me.

And yet, modern life is structurally dissociogenic. Dissociation isn't a pathological exception but an extraordinarily common adaptive response to a culture that systematically overwhelms nervous systems.

And I believe this fracture begins within The Womb and Early Postpartum, with The Mother. Or, The Motherless.

Our degree of sensitivity begins with our time in the womb, when we are learning for the first time, how to be in matter — and more specifically, how to live in union with another for the first time — with our Mother.

Did you know that by the time we are born, our whole brainstem is already developed? The part of our nervous system that is responsible for setting the baseline background and rhythm, texture and tone of our circadian rhythm — the very rhythm that connects us into the heartbeat of the Earth, to Nature and to all of existence? Arguably, if we did not receive adequeate nourishment, love and sustenance in the womb, we have already at this stage started to split off from our true nature and our nervous system has already had dissafety and dysregulation encoded into its baseline tone.

The brainstem, whilst many call it the most primitive part of the nervous system, is what drives our most fundamental biological drives — breathing, heart rate, the primitive startle response, the basic regulation of arousal — and this arrives fully formed at birth. What this means is that the foetus is not a passive passenger in the womb. It is an active, sensing, responding being, already learning the felt texture of the world through the only world it has ever known: the mother's body.

Her stress hormones cross the placenta. Her cortisol rhythms become the infant's cortisol rhythms. Her nervous system is, in the most literal sense, the infant's first environment. Not the environment the infant will one day move through — the environment the infant is already being shaped by, before the first breath, before the first cry, before the first eye opens to light.

We are formed, first, in relationship. Before we have a self, we have a bond.

And what happens to that bond — or what fails to happen — echoes for a lifetime.

In late March 2026, CNN published the findings of a months-long investigation into what it named an online rape academy — a digital ecosystem where men share videos of drugging and sexually assaulting their wives and partners, trade tips on sedatives and dosages, and livestream assaults to paying viewers.

At the centre of this ecosystem is a pornography website.

It is called Motherless.com.

Since reading the name of the website, something deep within me has been shaking itself loose. An existential and deep primoridal chill.

Motherless.

Not “underground.” Not “hidden.” Motherless. As if whoever named it understood, at some dim unconscious frequency, exactly what they were building — and what kind of man would come looking for it.

I. The Name as Diagnosis

In somatic and developmental psychology, there is a concept we return to again and again: that the earliest relational wound — the rupture between infant and primary caregiver — does not stay buried. It resurfaces. It finds form. It organises the nervous system around its absence the way scar tissue organises around a wound.

The mother, in the archetypal sense, is not simply a biological figure. She is the first experience of being held, seen, regulated, and loved without condition. She is the felt sense that the world is safe enough to be in. That the body is welcome. That intimacy does not precede devastation.

When that experience is absent — through emotional unavailability, neglect, violence, or the thousand unnamed ways attachment ruptures — what develops in the child is not simply grief. What develops is a nervous system oriented toward threat. A body that learns: closeness is dangerous. Vulnerability invites harm. Power is the only reliable language. And this, I would argue, the invisible root system beneath everything the CNN investigation uncovered.

And before I go further, I want to name something clearly: this is not an essay about blaming mothers. The mother who was not held cannot hold. The woman who was never taught the language of her own nervous system cannot fluently speak it to her child. The failure I am tracing is not individual — it is civilisational. It belongs to a culture that has systematically withdrawn support from the postpartum dyad, isolated new mothers, commodified care, and treated early attachment as a private concern rather than a collective responsibility. The wound runs upstream, far beyond any single woman.

II. The Newborn Is an Open Field

The brainstem arrives formed. But the rest of the brain — the limbic system, the cortex, the intricate circuitry of social and emotional life — is built after birth, and it is built in relationship.

A newborn is pure felt experience. It has no buffer between itself and the world. Every sound, every smell, every temperature shift, every quality of touch — received directly, without filter, without protection. The nervous system of an infant is not simply sensitive. It is, for a time, entirely permeable.

This is why the postpartum period is not a recovery period in the passive sense. It is a developmental crucible — for the infant, yes, but also for the mother-infant dyad as a relational unit. What researchers call co-regulation: the process by which the mother’s nervous system literally teaches the infant’s nervous system how to be. Her heartbeat, her breath, her skin-to-skin warmth, her voice — these are not comforts. They are the biological curriculum of safety.

Allan Schore, whose work on affective neuroscience and right brain development has been foundational in this field, describes the first two years of life as the period of maximum neuroplasticity — the window during which the architecture of the social and emotional brain is being laid down in direct response to the relational environment. Put simply: the quality of early attachment does not shape personality. It shapes the brain itself.

And what the brain learns in those early months — about safety, about trust, about whether a body in distress will be met with warmth or absence — it carries forward. Into childhood. Into adolescence. Into the bed where a man lies beside a woman he has chosen to marry.

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III. What Ancient Cultures Understood

Ancient cultures have always known this to be true — they simply encoded it in practice rather than peer-reviewed papers.

In traditional Chinese postpartum practice — zuo yuezi, or “sitting the month” — a new mother does not leave the house for thirty days after birth. She does not cook, clean, or engage in the demands of the outside world. She is fed, tended, and held so that she can hold. The logic is both physical and relational: her body is in profound recovery, and her baby is in profound formation, and the two are understood as inseparable. Some families are so fiercely protective of this threshold that they will, famously, chase away visitors with a broom.

This is not a practise of superstition — it is a civilisational wisdom that understood, long before attachment research formalised it, that the postpartum world must be made small, quiet, and safe — because the one being born into it is a field with no fence.

Similar practices exist across Indigenous cultures throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. The confinement is not about the mother’s weakness. It is about the infant’s radical openness, and the understanding that the quality of the container in those first weeks will shape the vessel for life.

We in the Western world have largely abandoned these practices. We send women home from hospital within twenty-four hours. We expect them back at their desks within weeks. We measure postpartum success by how quickly a mother bounces back — as if the baby had not just arrived into a body that is still learning to exist outside of one.

And then we wonder why the rates of insecure attachment keep climbing.

And yet — the point is never to locate the failure in the mother herself. The mother is not the origin of the problem; she is the site where a much older cultural abandonment becomes visible. When we withdraw the village, the ritual, the support structure, and the time, we are not simply leaving a woman alone. We are leaving the next generation without its first architecture of safety. This is a collective failure. And it demands a collective repair.

IV. Six Weeks

I want to pause here and say something I mean with full precision: not every child's first safe world needs to be the biological mother. What the infant requires is not a specific body — it is a quality of presence. Consistent, attuned, regulated, loving presence. This can be a father, a grandmother, an adoptive parent, a carefully chosen carer. The research on attachment bears this out: what predicts secure attachment is not the identity of the caregiver but the quality and consistency of the relational field they offer. Where healthy mothering is absent, another can step in — and that, too, is sufficient. That, too, can be enough to remedy this wound.

When my daughter was born, I stayed indoors with her for the first six weeks of her life.

I did this not because I was told to, though the traditional wisdom resonated deeply. I did it because I could feel, with the full weight of my clinical and embodied understanding, that she was not ready for the world — and that the world was not yet ready for her. That her nervous system was still largely continuous with mine. That what she needed was not stimulation, or socialising, or the well-meaning voices of everyone who wanted to meet her. What she needed was the shelter of my body, my breath, my smell, my constancy.

I protected her sensitivity the way you would protect a seedling from a late frost. Not because sensitivity is a weakness to be managed, but because sensitivity is a gift that needs time to take root before it meets the wind.

She is older now. And she is one of the most emotionally attuned, internally connected, securely attached children I have ever known — already in possession of something many adults spend decades trying to recover in therapy.

I cannot prove causation. I am not suggesting the six weeks alone made her who she is. But I will say this: I believe the quality of that early container matters more than we have language for. I believe that what we offer an infant in those first months is not simply care. It is the architecture of their interior world.

We are built, first, in the body of another.

V. The Ocean We Sealed

We protect infant sensitivity so it can become attunement. But we do not extend that protection to our boys for long.

I wrote an essay not long ago — We’ve Been Reading Men’s Emotions Wrong — that began with something a psychologist friend said to me: “I actually think men feel things more deeply than women. They’ve just been trained to hide it.” My first instinct was to push back. The more I sat with it, the more the evidence gathered around her words.

The neuroscience is remarkable and actually validates my friends theory. When researchers measure emotional responses physiologically — heart rate variability, cortisol, skin conductance — rather than relying on self-report, males often show equivalent or greater autonomic arousal than females in response to emotional stimuli. The body is reacting. It is the reported experience that doesn’t match. Neuroimaging suggests that while amygdala activity in males responds robustly to emotional stimuli, it shows weaker connectivity to the prefrontal regions responsible for verbal processing and articulation. Something is clearly happening inside. It simply doesn’t become words.

But perhaps the most striking finding is developmental. Before the full force of social conditioning takes hold — roughly in the first three to five years of life — boys are documented to be more emotionally reactive than girls of the same age. More easily distressed. More difficult to regulate. More intense in their responses.

It suggests that the emotional hierarchy we observe in adults — expressive women, contained men — is not the natural state. It is the product of decades of sustained social pressure applied to a nervous system that began, if anything, on the more sensitive end of the spectrum.

We begin as open fields. Boys and girls alike. And then, slowly, we teach the boys in particular, to close.

“Stop being a girl”, “Man Up” — these are just some of the common expressions we press onto boys, learned from our conditioned belief systems. These are what create shame, which is the force that ends up driving the kind of abhorrent behaviours we are witnessing, within The Rape Academy, The Files and within the architecture of the boy that was never given permission to be sensitive to himself and the world around him.

And yet, the mothers I spoke to — mothers who had raised both sons and daughters — were observing in their young boys was simply this: the emotional life that precedes the mask. The sensitivity that was there before we told them to put it down.

By the time they are five, the conditioning has begun. By the time they are men, the ocean is sealed. And what cannot be felt, named, or expressed — finds another outlet.

If you want to read the full essay, you can find it here. What I want to draw forward from it into this one is this: the men on Motherless.com are not the departure from the norm. They are the far end of a continuum that begins with a boy who was never held long enough, never taught the language of his own inner world, never shown that vulnerability is survivable.

VI. What Motherless Reveals

Men who drug and rape their sleeping partners are not, at their root, monsters conjured from nowhere. They are, most often, the products of profound relational wounding — men who never learned that another person’s feelings and inner reality are real, because their own needs and feelings were never met. Men whose early experience taught them that women — beginning with the mother — are objects of need, not subjects of being.

I am not saying this to excuse what is happening or to mitigate the need for personal and collective responsibility. I am saying this because excusing and understanding are not the same thing, and if we do not understand the root of this behaviour, we cannot interrupt it.

The philosopher Jessica Benjamin wrote about how the failure of mutual recognition in early life — the failure to see and be seen as a full subject — produces a psyche that can only relate through domination and submission. The other becomes either a mirror of the self’s needs, or a threat to be controlled. Intimacy, in this structure, is not possible. Only possession is.

The men on Motherless.com are not simply criminals. They are the symptom — the most visible, most horrifying edge — of a civilisational wound that begins in the womb and is compounded at every stage by a culture that teaches boys their feelings are liabilities.

A world of motherless men.

Men who were never held in a way that taught them: you are safe. You are enough. Her body is not yours to take. Her sleep is not your opportunity. Her unconsciousness is not her consent.

Men who were given power in place of permission to feel. And who, in the absence of intimacy, learned to take.

VII. The Revolution That Begins at Birth

This is why I wrote The MotherWild Revolution.

Not because I believe that better parenting is a simple solution to systemic violence. But because I believe, with everything I know as a physiotherapist, a somatic practitioner, and a woman who has worked with human nervous systems for over a decade, that the body keeps the score of early love — and early absence.

The MotherWild is not a parenting book in the conventional sense. It is an argument — grounded in attachment neuroscience, somatic medicine, and the wisdom of Eastern postpartum traditions — that the way we receive infants into the world has consequences that ripple across an entire lifetime, and outward into culture itself.

Early secure attachment is not a luxury. It is not a middle-class aspiration or a therapy buzzword. It is a biological necessity — the felt foundation upon which a child develops the capacity for empathy, emotional regulation, and the recognition of another person’s full humanity.

When we fail at this — as individuals, as institutions, as a culture — we do not simply produce anxious adults. We produce adults whose capacity for genuine intimacy has been structurally compromised. And into the gap where intimacy was supposed to live, power rushes in.

Power over bodies. Power over sleep. Power over women who trusted the men beside them in bed.

The word Motherless is the confession the site didn’t know it was making. The wound advertising itself. The absence, naming the thing it produced.

Coda

I am sharing this today from the same place I write everything: the conviction that what can be understood can be interrupted, and what can be interrupted can, slowly, be healed.

The MotherWild Revolution is, among other things, a map of how we begin. How we receive the ones who come after us. How we build, one nervous system at a time, a world in which the body of the beloved — awake or asleep, known or unknown — is held as inviolable.

We cannot go back and re-hold the men who were never held. But we can decide, now, how we meet the small ones arriving into this world.

We can protect their sensitivity long enough for it to become empathy.

We can refuse to seal the ocean.

Because if enough children grow up having been truly held,

the wound will have a different name.

The MotherWild Revolution: Cultural Change through Generational Activism

If this essay stirred something in you — if you recognise the root of this wound and want to understand how we begin to address it from the ground up — The MotherWild Revolution is for you.

It is my latest published book about early attachment, the architecture of belonging, and why the way we meet our youngest humans is the most radical act of social change available to us.

You can learn more and order your copy

Image Credit: Lisa Sorgini

Some of you may know — I have recently exited a year and a half long karmic relationship with someone, who I fell deeply in love with — someone I had been having recurring dreams of since I was a child.

We are both Scorpio. Born two days apart, two years separated, on opposite sides of Australia.

After having a mentoring session with one of my teachers yesteryday, who looked into the relationship for me and commented “wow, I don’t normally speak about past lives — but that is what is present here for you in your reading — you keep orbiting back into each other’s lives to make things right. You have a chance in this lifetime to repair the betrayals you have experienced with one another in many lifetimes before now, Sigourney”

Then last night, I went down an Astrological rabbit hole.

It started when I noticed that my moon was conjunct his Vertex, precisely — the moon representing past lives, emotional memory, the soul’s oldest knowing — and the Vertex, the point astrologers call the fated encounter, the place in the chart where destiny arrives wearing a face you somehow already recognise.

Then I decided to pull up a WHOLE marriage / union chart, going on a deep dive with asteroids and fixed stars.

I laid our asteroids over each other — the marriage ones, the soul ones, the fated ones — I sat back and went still. We have so many chart alignments for marriage and union — and my jaw dropped.

I decided to check my alignments with previous partners and lovers — and nothing. One other partner from 2017 had his sun conjunct my anti-vertex and one of my male best friends has his vertex / sun in conjuction with my vertex — but that was the extent of what I found — nothing like what I was seeing with this chart.

There were many overlaps of synastry conections for marriage between our charts — I won’t share them all out of privacy, but what I will share with you today, is how to witness love in your own chart, mapped against your lover/s or partner/s.

The charts don’t create love. They witness it.

This is what I want to teach you today: how to read marriage synastry not just through Venus and the 7th house (though we will get there), but through the asteroid layer — the mythological sub-language of the chart that speaks specifically about commitment, fidelity, sacred union, and what your soul is searching for in a partner.

I have put this information behind a paywall — you can subscribe (below) to learn about how to read this information in your chart — this information is for paid subscribers only.

Read more

As someone who has dedicated a large portion of their life to working alongside men, very intimately, because my heart is moved by the pain of the particularly wound that is being exposed in the collective right now — the silencing of their emotional bodies and the shadow that can emerge from that — it would be very easy for me to say “not all men” and to point to why I believe we need to focus on cultivating right relationship with the masculine.

And whilst I still believe this is the remedy — it does not cancel out, or outweigh our need to turn our gaze towards the very harsh reality that we are a witness to right now.

And fact of the matter is — despite being exposed to this world through my work — I have not lived an upbringing where I have had to protect and shield myself from abuse, violence and the harshness of the male perpetrator / gaze — or even worse, their assault.

I have witnessed it in more subtle ways — in emotional avoidance and volatility — but I have not had to live a life protecting myself against evil and for that, I am grateful. AND I am also aware of my privilege in this.

And so it would be easy for me to just tell you — and any other woman, that our attention and focus should be on learning to trust men.

But that is not the right response to what’s happening now.

And I believe we need both.

We need to learn how to come into right relationship with discernment — to learn when to trust, open and respect men and to understand WHEN there is healing available to us in our relationships.

And we need to learn WHEN to become fierce protectors and to use our anger as a way to protect the innocent — both our own innocence and the innocence of others — especially children.

So whilst I deeply adore and love men — and I am so blessed to be surrounded by so many incredible men — I will not be saying “not all men” and will not be giving any advice that asks you to simply shut off what is happening and what we are being asked to turn towards right now.

This seems obvious. And yet it is the thing most often forgotten when women speak about their exposure to male violence — the patterns they have witnessed, the data they are sitting with, the reality they cannot un-know by simply choosing a more optimistic perception.

The response that arrives fastest is usually some version of: not all men. Don’t let emotional contagion take over.

It is not offering nuance. It is asking the person with the most direct knowledge to doubt that knowledge — to treat her exposure as a distortion rather than information, her pattern recognition as hysteria rather than data. It is centring the comfort of those who haven’t seen it over the testimony of those who have.

I have sat with men in rooms most people never enter. I have witnessed, up close, what lives underneath the performance of capability and respectability.

The wound. The predictable, civilisational wound. The hunger that was never given a sacred container and became something evil and unconscious.

The data now confirms at scale what those rooms showed me in particular.

95% of men in an anonymous peer-reviewed study self-reported coercive sexual strategies. 62 million monthly visitors to a site built around the filmed assault of unconscious women.

This is not emotional contagion. This is information.

And whilst my work will continue to remain the same — to continue to open my heart to the beauty of the men around me — I can still hold the paradox of knowing that the majority of men do in fact hold deeply unconscious, societal wounding built into their psyche, that does in fact make them unsafe. And it is not my safe to tell other women, “not all men”.

In March of 2026, CNN published the results of a months-long investigation into what one survivor — a French lawmaker who had herself been drugged and assaulted by a sitting senator — named publicly as an online rape academy. A single website with sixty-two million visitors in one month. Over twenty thousand videos of women filmed while unconscious, organised under their own taxonomy: #passedout. #eyecheck — that last one referring to men lifting the closed eyelids of sedated women to camera, to verify for viewers that they were fully unconscious before the assault began.

Linked private Telegram groups. Nearly a thousand members. Men from every continent sharing dosing advice, sourcing “sleeping liquids” for global delivery, livestreaming assaults at twenty dollars a viewer, paid in cryptocurrency. Using the language of brotherhood. Of mentorship. Of craft.

Six weeks later, a study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence offered the wider portrait. Researchers surveyed 2,689 young men in the United States and Canada — anonymously, because identified men underreport — and asked whether they had ever used any of thirty-six documented strategies to have sex with a woman they knew had not consented. Ninety-five percent said yes. Nearly nine strategies on average. Sixty-five percent succeeded. Seventy percent experienced no negative consequences.

Here is what I want you to understand about the timing of all of this.

In Australia, marital rape was not a crime until 1976 in South Australia — the first common-law jurisdiction in the world to criminalise it — and not until the mid-1990s across the remaining states and territories. Not ancient history. Not a different civilisation. The mothers of people reading this sentence were alive when it was legal for a husband to rape his wife in most of this country.

We have had, at most, one generation of legal protection. One generation of a culture formally acknowledging that a woman’s body belongs to herself and not to her husband. And the data tells us, what one generation of law has and has not been able to reach.

Law changes behaviour at the surface. It does not reach the root.

I have been writing two books for the last year. They will both be released next month.

I began it in May 2025, during a panchakarma retreat in India, when something cracked open in me that I had been holding at a distance for a long time — the years I spent working as a Dakini in Melbourne, in spaces that were dark and secret and underground, with men who arrived immaculate and hollowed out and wept before they knew they were weeping.

What I witnessed in those rooms was not aberration. It was pattern. The same pattern, wearing different faces, different suits, different degrees of wealth and power. Men who had succeeded completely at what the culture asked of them — and in that success, had lost access to everything that would have made them human.

The first book I have written is called When Eros Overthrows an Empire: A reckoning with desire, shadow, and the collapse of false power. It is about what happens when a society severs desire from the sacred and calls the severing civilisation.

To be civil = to be courteous, formal, polite, respectful, mannerly, cordial.

And civil, is how they keep us controlled, locked off from our primal instinctual nature — which is key to our aliveness, our power and our capacity to maintain sovereignty.

Understood?

About the two-thousand-year mechanism by which erotic energy — driven underground, stripped of its cosmological meaning, denied every container that might have given it direction — erupts as the thing we are now measuring in studies and exposure investigations and the statistics of assault that rise, decade by decade.

It is also — and this is the part that matters most to me — about what was taken, and what is returning, and what becomes possible when desire is met with something other than shame.

The Dakini has always known this. Every tradition that held Eros as sacred has always known this. And the deliberate dismantling of those traditions — the burning of the temples, the criminalisation of the devadasis, the conversion of sacred sexuality into sin, into pathology, into commodity — is not background context for the crisis we are living through.

It is its direct cause.

This book is medicine for men. It is medicine in the oldest sense — something that works at the root, that asks not only what happened but what was missing that made it possible.

Because what was missing was Eros in it’s purest nature, which is erotic intelligence: the understanding that desire is sacred, that it moves toward genuine meeting or it distorts, that it requires a container or it erupts, that it was always trying to reach something more than hedonism and temporary satiation.

The book will be released to the public next month. I am opening a waitlist now for those who want to be among the first to receive it.

If this landed somewhere in your body — if something in you recognised what I am pointing at — then this book is for you, or for the men in your life, or for both.

The pavement is cracking. What is rising is older than the suppression.

Join the waitlist for When Eros Overthrows an Empire below.

Join the waitlist