Because I have realised, that love is inclusive of the parts we …

Read more

They seem expanded at first — glowing, alive with life. But when I tune into them… like, really tune in, I often feel an override happening. Subtler parts trying to communicate that are being taken over by the luminious light of Eros.

And then often when you get to know these people, you realise they are feeding off Eros. Vampirically so. They require it — the practice, the activation, the hit of erotic life-force — the way others require a drink at the end of the day. If they stop and cannot get their erotic needs met, they wither. They do not have the foundations for that luminosity built into their own system and they require it from their “tantric” practise.

This is the tell.

Because genuine Tantric practice — the kind that has roots, that has been transmitted through lineage with care and over time — does not produce dependency. It produces capacity. The luminosity becomes structural. It gets built into the system, metabolised into the tissues, integrated into the nervous system as a permanent upgrade rather than a recurring loan.

What I’m describing instead is energetic debt dressed as awakening. The field is open, the light is real, but the foundations were never laid. And so the practice becomes a maintenance requirement rather than a liberation — a way of managing the very hunger it created.

The feast I am talking about here is not just a metaphor.

In the Vajrayana, and specifically in the Chöd lineage of Machig Labdrön, there is a torma offering — a ritual feast prepared and offered consciously to whatever beings arise from the practitioner's own psyche and field: demons, hungry ghosts, attachments, entities. You cut the body of ego. You become the feast. You offer it freely, with discernment, with full knowledge of what you are doing and why.

The offering in Chöd is not passive. It requires years of preliminary practice — ngöndro, refuge, guru yoga, the development of rigpa, the capacity to recognise what arises without being consumed by it. You do not walk into a Chöd retreat having done a weekend breathwork intensive. You walk in having spent years developing the discernment to know what is demon, what is projection, what is genuine energetic presence — and how to meet each without merging with it.

This is a tradition that understood, with absolute precision, that opening the subtle body without containment is not liberation. It is dinner.

What the biofield actually is

The biofield — what the Vedic traditions name the prāṇamaya koṣa and vijñānamaya koṣa, what Wilhelm Reich named the orgone field, what modern biofield science is beginning to map through biophoton emission and torsion field research. It is a real electromagnetic and subtle-energetic structure that surrounds and interpenetrates the physical body, extending approximately 1.5 to 3 metres from the skin surface.

It is porous by design. The nāḍīs — the subtle channels mapped in detail across both the Tantric and Āyurvedic traditions — are the architecture through which prāṇa is taken in, metabolised, and expelled. They are not sealed. They cannot be sealed. That is not their function.

What they do have, in an initiated practitioner, is gating. The capacity to take in selectively. To metabolise rather than accumulate. To expel what does not belong.

This gating corresponds to what trauma-informed somatic therapy would call nervous system regulation, what the Taoist tradition calls wei wu wei — receptive action, not passive receiving. It is a developed capacity and it requires training. This is what I teach my clients.

Most contemporary “tantra” teaches people how to open the gate. Almost none of it teaches what happens when you do.

The new age reframe and its cost

The lineages that gave birth to what is now marketed as tantra were never casual about initiation. The Kaula traditions — from which much of the contemporary "sacred sexuality" movement draws, however distantly — distinguished sharply between paśu (bound, uninitiated), vīra (initiated hero), and divya (divine). The paśu was specifically warned against attempting vīra practices without proper transmission.

The Trika Śaivism of Kashmir — the sophisticated non-dual Tantric philosophy underlying traditions like Spanda and Pratyabhijñā — was never a weekend workshop. Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka, the definitive text of this lineage, contains more than 5,800 verses of meticulous instruction and in my experience, there is a reason for this… it is important when you are working at the level of the subtle body and consciousness.

What happened in the twentieth century — particularly through the lineage cross-contamination of the Human Potential Movement, the Osho schools, and the mainstreaming of Reichian bodywork — was that the practices were transmitted without the epistemology. The how was extracted from the why. The feast was laid out, and no one kept the door.

When awakening is presented as the goal and discernment is not taught as the prerequisite, you produce, then inevitably you end up with a generation of practitioners who are permanently in aperture, permanently in reception, with no metabolic structure to support what they are taking in.

What feeds at an unguarded table

The Tantric traditions, across lineages, were unanimous on a point that modern spiritual culture has almost entirely erased: not everything that comes through an open field is beneficial. Not everything that arrives in an expansion state is benign. Not everything that enters during a breathwork or a sexual energetic practice is yours.

The Vajrayana calls these presences maras and pretas — hungered ones, obstructors. The Trika tradition maps them as grahins — those that seize. The African diaspora traditions, which have some of the most sophisticated biofield hygiene in any living lineage, have extensive protocols for exactly this: what enters, how to know it, how to release it.

These traditions are not being superstitious. They are being precise about something that modern neuroscience is only beginning to approximate in the language of mirror neuron systems, somatic countertransference, and interoceptive overwhelm.

An open field draws. That is its nature. What is drawn is a function of the field’s resonance, the practitioner’s unresolved material, and — and this is the part that is missing from almost every contemporary training — the practitioner’s intention and epistemic relationship to what enters.

Without that — without the capacity to recognise, name, discern, metabolise, or consciously offer — the field accumulates. Energetic experiences are mistaken for spiritual progress. Expansion is mistaken for liberation. What feels like opening is, in the language of the Tantric traditions, āveśa without viveka: possession without discernment.

Taking advice from the Chöd

Machig Labdrön did not teach people to close. She taught people to offer.

The distinction is everything.

The Gcod practice — literally “to cut” — does not retreat from the hungry guests. It cuts through the ego’s resistance to them. It transforms the practitioner’s own body into the feast, offered consciously, so that the hungering presences find what they need and depart transformed. The practitioner is not consumed because the practitioner has become the cook. They hold the knife. They know what is on the table. They know why it is being offered and what it will do.

This is the higher technology that contemporary tantra has amputated from itself in its enthusiasm for the opening.

The opening without the cook is not liberation. It is not healing. It is an accident waiting to be named.

What initiated practice actually provides

The container that the lineages built around these practices was not restriction. It was exactly what the container of a skilled fermenter provides to a living culture: the right conditions for transformation rather than putrefaction.

Initiation — dikṣā in the Sanskrit — is not ceremony for ceremony’s sake. It is a transmission that installs, over time, the practitioner’s capacity to work at the level of the subtle body with precision. The guru-śiṣya paramparā (the teacher-student lineage chain) existed because the development of discernment is not a solo endeavour. It is cultivated in relationship, over time, with someone who has already developed it.

Preliminary practices — ngöndro in the Vajrayana, sādhana in the Hindu Tantric schools — were not spiritual warm-ups. They were the development of the practitioner’s metabolic structure. Their biofield hygiene. Their capacity to take in prāṇa and meet what arose without merging with it.

This is the part that has been lost. And without it, what we call tantra is something else entirely.

It is not spirituality I am critiquing. It is the absence of craft.

A table set without a cook is not a meal. It is an invitation with no host.

The Tantric lineages knew this. They built entire architectures of discernment around it — not to restrict access to the sacred, but because they understood, with an intimacy born of direct transmission, what happens when the subtle body opens and no one is home to meet what walks through the door.

We are living with the consequences of forgetting this.

The work now is not to close. It is to learn, finally, how to cook.

Want to learn more on the topic of energetic mastery?

Join me this July for the Spinal Attunement Online Training Foundations course in energetic mastery. Applications are now open and we start July 6th.

Apply for an interview

Integrating back into my life back home, after living in a monastery and spending an extensive time in India studying — not so simple. That is where the real work began.

Over the past decade and a half, I have found myself moving between worlds.
The Non-Dual teachings of the Lam Rim and the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism; I studied in "Yellow Hat" schools, which emphasizes strict monastic discipline, the study of Buddhist philosophy (Sutra), and advanced esoteric practices (Tantra).

I have also studied and dived deep into the world of feminine embodiment and movement arts. A background in Martial Arts as a black belt in Shotokhan Karate, a teacher of the feminine tantric arts and the path of Red Tantra and practitioner of the daoist arts.

The dance between these seemingly different worlds, has meant that I have been able to create integrated practises, that converge the dual and the non-dual, in a way that seemingly does not polarise or conflict, but rather, converges opposite schools of thought.

Just this week, teaching a week long Spinal Attunement practitioner training in The Netherlands, I was sitting with the seeds of this article — The Demonisation of Ascension Teachings. It was inspired by something I noticed in some of my participants.

Sometimes, when you work with the body and somatics, without the counterpart of having the ability to sit back in non-attachment and the non-dual or spiritual space of witnessing, you can become seriously weighed down and heavy. This is what was happening with some of my clients. One of them even mentioned that since she has been practising emotional release work with clients, she has lost her connection to spirit / the divine.

This is why I do not practise bodywork alone. I cannot. It is exhausting to my spirit.

Any practise that works with the denser bodies — the physical, the emotional, even the mental — that is devoid of the work with the soul and spirit bodies, is limiting and can keep you stuck. Not only that, but it is tiring.

Having access to the higher realms and being able to lift up and out into a space of ascension and ultimately, lightness, helps to regenerate the spirit.

The Pendulum Swing

Over the last several years, I’ve watched the language of ascension — light, expansion, higher self, 5D, awakening — become almost shameful in certain circles. Spaces that once spoke fluently in this vocabulary now flinch from it. “Embodiment,” “somatic,” “grounded,” “nervous system” have become the new currency of legitimacy. To speak of ascension now, in many wellness and spiritual spaces, is to risk being filed under naive, dissociated, or worse — spiritually narcissistic.

And I understand why.

For decades, transcendence-oriented teachings often did exactly what their critics now accuse them of. They taught people to rise above the body, to transcend emotion, to bypass grief, anger, and unprocessed trauma in favour of “staying positive” or “holding a higher vibration.” I have sat with people — and been that person — who used spiritual language as a sophisticated form of avoidance. Who floated so far from their own bodies that they couldn’t feel the ground beneath them, couldn’t feel their own anger, couldn’t feel the people they were hurting.

So when the somatic, trauma-informed wave arrived — and it arrived with a level of intensity in recent times — it landed like medicine. Suddenly there was permission to feel. To be in the body. To stop performing transcendence and start metabolising what was actually there.

This wasn’t a fad. It was a correction the culture needed.

But like most corrections, it has a shadow of its own — and I think we’re starting to see it.

When the Body Becomes the New Ceiling

Here is what I notice now, working with practitioners and clients across the world: there’s a way of being “in the body” that has become its own kind of trap. A subtle orthodoxy where anything that points beyond immediate sensation, beyond personal narrative, beyond the felt experience of this moment in this body, gets quietly suspicious. As though the only legitimate spiritual currency left is what can be located somatically, here, now.

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a return to "the body is an illusion, only spirit matters." That pendulum swing got us into trouble in the first place. But I think there's a real risk of over-correction — of becoming so identified with density, with sensation, with the endless project of regulation and embodiment, that we lose the very thing that gives the body its meaning: its relationship to something larger than itself.

The body without the vertical axis becomes a closed loop. A place to live, but not a place to be moved through. And I’ve seen people get stuck there — endlessly processing, endlessly regulating, endlessly “doing the work” on the nervous system, without ever arriving anywhere. Density without direction.

This is the part of the conversation I rarely hear named: that pure somatic focus, without something to orient toward, can become its own bypass. A bypass of meaning. A bypass of the sacred. A bypass, ironically, of the very transcendence that gave embodiment practices their original context in every lineage that ever held them — Tantra, Daoist internal alchemy, the contemplative traditions that never separated body from spirit in the first place.

The Era We Just Lived Through

I don’t think this arc was incidental. From 2018 to 2025, Uranus — the planet of sudden awakening, disruption, revolution — moved through Taurus: the sign of the body, the senses, the earth, matter, the felt and physical world. We have just come out of that era.

Of course this was when “embodiment” became the watchword. Of course this was when the body demanded to be reckoned with — through a pandemic that forced the entire world into a confrontation with breath, illness, mortality, and physical isolation; through the explosion of somatic and trauma-informed language into everyday vocabulary; through a cultural insistence that nothing could be trusted unless it could be felt, regulated, located in the nervous system. Uranus in Taurus was a revolution in matter. A shock to the body. A forced descent into density, after decades of teachings that had floated above it.

And it needed to happen. I don’t think the culture could have metabolised the bypasses of the ascension era any other way. Sometimes a planet has to crash through a sign to make a point the soft way never could.

But that era is over. Uranus has moved into Gemini — and Gemini is dual by nature. The twins. The bridge. The sign that holds two things at once without collapsing them into one. And what I’m sensing now — in myself, in the people I work with, in the wider field — is a hunger for non-dual teaching again. Not non-dual as an escape from the body (that was the old trap), but non-dual as the capacity to hold spirit and matter, ascension and embodiment, transcendence and density, simultaneously — without needing one to dominate or correct the other.

I have even started my meditation practise again, which I have been avoiding for some time now.

The Taurus era taught us to come down, to land, to feel, to inhabit. That was necessary and real. But an era that asks everything to resolve into density alone is, in its own way, just as partial as an era that asked everything to resolve into light. Gemini doesn’t ask us to choose. It asks us to hold both wires live at once — which is, I think, exactly where this conversation needs to go next.

Integration, Not Another Pole

What I’m not interested in is trading one orthodoxy for another. The answer to “ascension teachings bypass the body” is not “therefore only the body matters.” Both of these, taken as endpoints, are traps. Both can become identities people hide inside.

What I’m interested in is integration. The body not as a prison to escape, and not as a shrine to worship, but as the instrument through which something larger moves. The vessel, not the destination. This is what the old traditions actually taught, before the West split them into “spiritual” and “somatic” camps and then pitted those camps against each other.

Ascension was never the problem. Bypassing the body in service of ascension was the problem. And now, embodiment risks becoming its own kind of ceiling if it forgets what it's for.

I think of my early twenties self, walking home from yoga therapy training, feeling light as a feather. That lightness wasn’t a bypass. It was what becomes possible when the body is finally clear enough, settled enough, safe enough, to let something move through it. Ascension, rightly understood, isn’t a departure from the body. It’s what the body becomes capable of holding, once it’s no longer in defence.

That’s the integration I feel is needed, now. Not body or spirit. Not grounded or expanded. The body as the place where the sacred actually happens — not despite matter, but through it.

Usually, only my closest friends know about my dating life.

And typically, I do not date within my own industry — and more specifically, not within the spiritual industry.

In fact, most of the men I date, no one knows and I like it that way.

I am a Scorpio (ahem, Scorpio sun conjunct mercury, pluto, lilith and mars is also in the mix there). I like depth, and I like some things to be concealed and hidden from the public.

Relationships, for me, are one of those things.

People get confused sometimes, because I can be quite bold in what I share publicly, online. And yet, I am also deeply secretive and interior about a lot of what transpires in my life.

I like to keep my relationships, just for me. Not for others. And certainly not for the public.

Which is funny, because I have just written a whole book, inspired by the muse (my lover) that has been in my life for the past two years. It has been the most intense, soul lluminating lovership of my life.

He is a scorpio, like myself, born two days after me. Also deeply private — he keeps his life entirely off social media and has, in fact, chosen to wipe his internet footprint clean (you can barely find reference to him on the internet, even though he is a filmmakrer). He doesn’t like being in the limelight.

And yet.. he has a bestselling book dedicated to him… ha, funny how things work isn’t it.

I like dating outside of my industry. In fact, I am not sure I can have it any other way…

I learned this the hard way some years ago, dating someone in my industry, who joined me in some of my trainings, and crossed my boundaries (well, he had no boundaries), flirting with women in the space in total disrespect of our connection. I closed that swiftly some years ago and never looked back. Since then, I made a pact with myself to date people that would not cross over with my teaching circles and sphere — someone that I do not even have to talk about my work to. I like it this way. My frienships and collaborations are for esoteric sh*t talk and banter. My love life is my place where I come home and unwind.

If you want to read about my particular journey with love over the past two years, I have written about it in my latest release, The Shape that Love Refuses to Take: Love as Magnum Opus. It released on the Venus Jupiter conjunction in Cancer this week and has so far, been a bestseller in multiple categories in The US, Australia and Germany (eee, thankyou!).

I am offering the e-book for just 99c for another 12 hours before I put the prices up.

You can purchase your copy here:

Purchase my latest book here

Oh, and I have a heartfelt request. If this book has touched you or moved you in some ways, that you write an amazon review for the book. I am in my era of receivership, and so this would mean oh-so-much to me.

Thankyou.

With love from the Netherlands,

Sigourney Belle x

(I am celebrating today by going to the largest occult museum/library in the world, The Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (Ritman Library) and by having my first coffee for the week (I have been off coffee whilst teaching this week) + getting a massage in Amsterdam. Yum.

My body is my lover.

My body is my Mother.

My body is my daughter.

My body is the city.

My body is the ocean.

My body is mine; and not mine, all at once.

I have been reflecting on this alot lately — particularly over the last year, watching my body shapeshift and change in response to my lovers.

In particular, two interesting experiences have made me realise, just how permeable, malleable and “not my own” this body is.

How it belongs to me, but it also belongs to the ocean. It also belongs to the city streets my feet made contact with this morning.

It belongs to me, but it also does not.

Just last year, something in my body magically healed, through my relationship, after years of trying to “work it out” on my chiropractor table and beyond.

A tension in the back of my heart. A circle of numbness over my right scapula. One that has been there my whole life.

I have had weekly network spinal chiropractic care for nearly a decade, working on this exact tension.

It would move, then, like a spring, it would recoil again slowly… progress, and then retraction.

It wasn’t until last year, on the network chiropractic table, when all of a sudden, my body was able to breathe a little more deeply into my heart, that I realised — it’s gone.

What I was processing at the time of receiving the work, was the deep grief that was moving through me in relationship to a man that I was with (and am still with, in some sense), that bought back memories of past lives together — many, not just one.

The connection was unlike anything I have ever experienced, and I wrote a whole book based upon my experience — it comes out this week and is called The Shape that Love Refuses to Take and is an ode to soul based love.

The relationship unlocked memories and grief of a past love that I feel I have been searching for my whole life.

And the most interesting part? He had the exact same tension in the right side of his heart. Although, his maniested more physically, more grossly, as a physical lump in the exact same area.

Since meeting him, my heart has opened in ways I did not know were possible — it continues to contract and expand beyond what I would have been able to have had access to alone. And ailments I have lived with, are…disappearing.

If “twin flames” were a true mythology that I believed in, these past years would have confirmed my ideology.

What is interesting, is that this mythology has been written about in history.

In Plato’s Symposium, the playwright Aristophanes tells the story of the original humans. We were not, he says, what we are now. We were whole — four arms, four legs, two faces looking in opposite directions. Spherical. Complete. So complete, in fact, that we threatened the gods.

And so Zeus split us.

Not as punishment — as a severance that would keep us humble, searching, perpetually incomplete. He cut us down the middle, pulled the skin around to heal the wound, and left us here — half-creatures, wandering.

“Love is born into every human being,” Aristophanes says. “It calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”

I used to think this was poetry.

Then I met a man who carries the same wound I carry — in the same place, on the same side of the body. His manifesting as a physical lump where mine lived as a circle of numbness. Two bodies. One injury. Written in flesh, across lifetimes.

What healed in me, healed through him — not because he did anything, not because he fixed me. But because the field between us remembered something that my body alone had forgotten. The chiropractic table held me for a decade and could not reach it. Love reached it in a year.

Perhaps the splitting was never only mythological. Perhaps it is quite literally written into our tissue — the places we cannot breathe into alone, the tensions that live in us like an unanswered question, waiting for the one whose wound mirrors our own. Not so that they completeus, but so that in their presence, we remember that we were never, in truth, incomplete.

The search for the other half is the search for ourselves.

And sometimes — the body knows before the mind does.

This time, something chilling was revealed through my search.

Two names were pulled up, of famous “Sigourney’s” — one being Sigourney Weaver, who I know. She actually named herself after a minor character in The Great Gatsby called when she was just 14 because she found her former name, Susan, boring & unsuitable.

Anyway, I knew this already… but what I find interesting is that there is a woman that is almost as famous (maybe even more so) that has largely been forgotten, called Sigourney.

A 19th century writer… and the first commercially paid writer in the US, publishing 67 books and over 300 magazine articles.

So important and revolutionary in her era, a town in Iowa was named after her (Sigourney). She had clubs and institutes form in her name.

During the lyceum movement of the 19th century, women across America named literary societies and study clubs in her honour, including the Sigourney Society in Oxford, New York (founded at the Oxford Female Seminary around 1836), and the Sigourney Society in Gaffney, South Carolina.

She wrote about themes similar to me— grief, death, motherhood. She wrote for ordinary mothers, who had no way of expressing and sharing about the daily griefs of their identity, with Motherhood. A big theme in my latest book, The MotherWild Revolution.

And as i’m reading about this woman, chills through my whole body, I had flashback to a little card reader I saw on the streets of Woodstock some years ago. She told me that I had a strong guide around me - a famous writer in the US, with a prolific voice in the same field I write within— motherhood, politics, theology and more. At the time, what she said didn’t resonate. Seeing images of Lydia Sigourney today on my research rabbit hole, my body responded strongly — it is her.

It turns out that Lydia Sigourney also wrote about other topics I write about and am

passionate about. She was passionate about philanthropy, politics and justice.

The male literary establishment hated that she outsold them. They called her sentimental. Minor. Popular — as though that were an insult.

I am talking famous male writers, like Edgar Allen Poe.

And yet… despite the public mockery she received, she kept writing anyway.

When she died, a poet composed verses for her memorial tablet. A town kept her name on its courthouse. Women across America had already been gathering in her honour for decades, forming literary societies, naming their study clubs after her.

And yet.

Ask anyone today who Lydia Sigourney was.

Most will not know.

Her name lives on most visibly through the actress Sigourney Weaver who borrowed it from a Fitzgerald novel — not even knowing the weight of what she was carrying.

It makes me wonder… how often we do this when we name ourselves, or our projects…

The world often uses what was built in powerful women’s names. And forgets who laid the stone.

Some women enter a room, features plain and her outfit unremarkable — and yet, the whole energy of the space shifts and reorganises itself.

A woman connected to her sexual prowess and deep feminine well, knows that this is no coincidence.

However most reach for this kind of radiance and feminine magnetism through external measures — by changing our outer appearance, buying a new outfit, through cosmetic surgery, layers of makeup. The faux feminine.

As someone who’s lineage and ancestral background is rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Daoism, with training in these fields and also deep immersion into the field of Tantra in this lifetime, I want to explain this phenomena a little from more of an Esoteric perspective.

In Chinese medicine it is Jīng (精) — Essence — the most precious and most material of the Sān Bǎo, the Three Treasures, alongside Qì and Shén. Of the three, Jing is the densest and the most finite. It is stored in the Kidneys (Shèn), seated in the lower dāntián, and it governs the entire arc of a life: conception, the maturation of the tiān guǐ (the reproductive essence that arrives at menarche and recedes at menopause), the strength of the bones and marrow, the lustre of the hair, the hearing, the will. We are issued a fixed measure of Yuán Jīng — Prenatal Essence, the inheritance of our parents' Jing at the moment of conception — and across a lifetime we spend it.

The classical image is the candle. Qì is the flame: bright, daily, replenished by breath and grain and rest. Jīng is the wax. When the wax runs low the flame gutters, however much air you fan across it. And Shén — Spirit, the radiance in the eyes, the coherence of the whole being — is the quality of the light thrown. This is the key the cosmetic age has lost: what we call radiance is Shén shining through a body well-supplied with Jīng. The face is not the source. The face is the lamp’s glass. When essence is abundant, Spirit pours through it and we call her beautiful.

What depletes Jing Essence.

Jing erodes through ordinary life. Chronic Shèn depletion comes from overwork past one’s reserves, from kǒng (fear) held in the body over years, from the Mìng Mén fire (the “Gate of Vitality,” the pilot light of Yáng between the Kidneys) being asked to burn what isn’t there. The Daoist alchemists watched stimulants, sleeplessness, and chronic sympathetic arousal draw down Yuán Qì — Original Qi — which forces the body to convert precious Jīng to cover the deficit. The relentless schedules and to-do-lists in the West are taxing on our precious vital force.

But the texts also name the dramatic expenditures — acts that can rapidly deplete our Jing Essence. And these are different for female and male bodies.

For men, the classical concern is ejaculation. The fángzhōng shù, the Daoist “arts of the bedchamber,” are built almost entirely on the premise that semen is Jīng made manifest — essence in its most concentrated, most transmissible form — and that its frequent loss is the fastest drain a man can open in himself. This is why the inner alchemy (nèidān) of male practice is a discipline of retention and reversal: huán jīng bǔ nǎo, “returning the Jing to nourish the brain,” learning to ride arousal without emission and to circulate that charge upward through the Dū Mài (Governing Vessel) rather than spilling it out and down. The aim was never repression — the lineages are clear that stagnation can create pathology, also. The aim was conservation, so that essence could be refined upward: Jīng into Qì, Qì into Shén, Shén returned to the Void. Spend it carelessly and a man stalls at the first gate.

For women, the great expenditure is childbirth. And yet, I want to also explain something about childbirth and postpartum that isn’t so widely recognised…

Female alchemy (nǚ dān) recognises that a woman's essence-economy runs on a different circuit. Her Jing is bound up with Tiān Guǐ and expressed through Xuè — Blood — governed by the Chōng Mài (the Penetrating Vessel, the "Sea of Blood") and the Rèn Mài (the Conception Vessel). Menstruation itself is a monthly tithe of essence-rich Blood. But pregnancy, labour, and the postpartum draw on the reserve more steeply than any other event in a woman's life.

In gestation she is not merely growing tissue. She is transmitting Yuán Jīng directly — endowing the child with its own prenatal inheritance, drawn from her Kidneys, her Chōng and Rèn, her marrow and bone and Blood. The Tibetan medical view names something parallel: the child is formed from the red and white thig-le (bindu), the generative essence-drops of the parents, and the mother spends hers prodigally. Birth, in this reading, is the single largest sanctioned transfer of Jīng a body ever performs.

This is why the postpartum collapse is so severe and so misread by the modern West. The depletion of the yuè zǐ period — the “month” after birth — is not poor character or hormonal bad luck. It is, in the lineage language, a woman running on a hemorrhaged account: Xuè deficient, Qì scattered, the Chōng and Rèn emptied, the Kidney Jīng drawn perilously low. The confinement traditions — Chinese zuò yuèzi (”sitting the month”), the warming yǎng xuè foods, the absolute prohibition on cold, wind, and exertion — were never superstition. They were Jīng-and-Xuè recovery protocols: an entire civilisation’s accumulated knowledge of how to refill the vessel that birth empties.

So the logic looks settled: childbirth depletes, therefore childbirth diminishes radiance. But here the framework, taken too literally, begins to lie.

The controversy, and the deeper truth

From one perspective, pregnancy is pure loss — a hemorrhage of Yuán Jīng, ageing the mother, spending what the texts say cannot be regrown. There is truth in this and plenty of women emerge from unsupported births visibly older, Shén dimmed, Jīng never restored, carrying a depletion that follows them for decades.

But that is only half the cosmology, and I am a living example of how that does not have to be the case.

Pregnancy and postpartum are also one of the most concentrated initiations into feminine surrender a woman will ever be offered — into Yīn in its purest expression: the receptive, yielding, downward-and-inward-flowing principle that is the very ground of feminine radiance. In Tantric terms, birth is a forced dissolution — a death of the maiden-self, a bardo, an enforced encounter with the Dakini's cremation-ground face, Vajrayoginī who destroys what must end so that what is true can be reborn. The depletion and the regeneration are not opposites. They are the same gate…

When a woman fights the process — resists the surrender, bolts back to performance and Yáng doing, treats her postpartum body as a fault to correct, and is held by no one — the yuè zǐ becomes pure expenditure. The Jīng pours out and is never recalled. She ages from it, and the lineages would say she has spent essence to no refinement.

But when a woman submits — when she lets the maiden be undone, treats the dissolution not as catastrophe but as sacred remaking, and is nurtured, warmed, held, and permitted to do nothing but recover — the same event turns regenerative. This is the alchemy of childbirth. The deep parasympathetic surrender that zuò yuèzi was engineered to protect is precisely the state in which the body can rebuild Xuè and consolidate Jīng. Yīn repletion requires stillness, warmth, and safety — the exact conditions surrender produces and resistance destroys. A woman truly held in her confinement emerges not hollowed but deepened: her Shén not dimmed but matured, her radiance carrying a Jīng-density and gravity the maiden never had.

This is the whole of it: the difference between depletion and regeneration is not the event. It is whether she surrenders, and whether she is held.

The same fire that consumes the candle can, under the right conditions, be the heat by which new wax is poured. Childbirth spends essence — yes. But the surrendered, warmed, ritually-held postpartum is one of the rare windows in which a woman’s Chōng and Rèn are primed to refill, in which she can lay down deeper reserves than she carried as a maiden. This is the esoteric meaning beneath the zuò yuèzi prohibitions: protect the surrender, and you protect the regeneration.

What this means for radiance

If beauty is Shén shining through Jīng, then the most radiant women are not those who have spent nothing. They are those who have spent profoundly and been replenished. The maiden’s beauty is borrowed brightness — Jīng not yet drawn upon, tiān guǐ freshly arrived. The mother’s radiance, when she has been carried through her remaking, is the deeper and harder-won thing: essence that has passed through the cremation-ground and returned.

We have built a culture that depletes women — that scatters their Qì, drains their Xuè, and burns their Mìng Mén fire on perpetual Yáng doing — and then sells them the symptoms back as beauty problems. The serum, the procedure, the relentless correction: all of it labours on the flame and the glass while the wax runs out beneath, unattended.

The lineage medicines point elsewhere entirely. Guard your Jīng. Spend it only on what is worthy. And when you spend it greatly, as in birth, demand to be held while you make it again.

That is where radiance actually comes from. Not from what is applied. From what is conserved — and what one is brave enough to surrender to.

And if you have enjoyed reading this, you may also enjoy my latest book, The MotherWild Revolution: Cultural Change through Generational Activism

purchase your copy here

This is the question people can’t bring themselves to ask, because asking it means admitting that something happened — and without a clear incident to name, the mind keeps filing it under maybe I’m being unfair.

But the body doesn’t negotiate like that. The body just registers: I am not safe here. I have to be careful. I have to be smaller.

Some people never develop the capacity to sit with their own emotional weight. The shame, the rage, the grief — it has to go somewhere. So it goes outward. Into the air of the relationship. Into you. Not through cruelty, necessarily. Through projection. Through criticism that never fully lands and never fully stops. Through an emotional climate so dense with the person’s unprocesed inner landscape that yours starts to feel like an imposition.

You end up managing two people's psychological reality. Yours, and theirs. Except you only get credit for one.

The degradation is cumulative. A comment here. A reframing of what you just said. A sigh. The sense that your joy is somehow naive, your anger disproportionate, your needs inconvenient. None of it rises to the level of an event. All of it lands in the body as a verdict.

You are not too sensitive. You have become exquisitely calibrated to an environment that required it.

This is what covert relational abuse does. It doesn't leave you with a story you can tell. It leaves you with a self that has been reorganised around someone else's unprocessed pain — and a deep, disorienting uncertainty about what you actually think, feel, or want anymore.

The difficulty of naming it is not evidence that it didn't happen. It is evidence of how sophisticated this particular erosion is. Overt abuse leaves marks. This kind leaves fog.

Recovery doesn’t begin with leaving — though it may include that. It begins with the moment you stop explaining away what your body has known for years. With the decision to believe your own account, even before anyone else does.

You are not imagining it. You were not too much. What you were carrying was never yours.

— Sigourney Belle

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.

Leave a comment

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.

Share

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.

Leave a comment

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.

Share

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. 🤍

Share

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…

Read more

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.