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

Big love,

SB x

There is a moment, just before you open your mouth, when the whole body leans forward. The jaw sets. The breath climbs into the chest. Someone at the table has said something you find wrong, half-formed, or simply different from what you hold to be true, and every cell in you wants to correct it.

Most of us were never taught what to do with that moment. We were taught to have opinions, to defend them, to speak up. We were told that silence is complicity. Very few of us were shown that silence can also be a discipline, a kind of power held in reserve.

This piece is about that moment. It is about discernment, the art of knowing when your voice is medicine and when it is noise. And it is about a quality I have come to call willful ignorance, a phrase usually thrown as an insult, which I want to reclaim as one of the more refined skills a human being can cultivate.

Two Kinds of Not Knowing

Blissful ignorance is the state of the child. You do not know what you do not know, and so nothing disturbs you. It carries a real sweetness, the ease of a body that has never been asked to hold complexity. It is also fragile. The first time life shows you what was hidden, the bliss cracks, and you cannot go back to it.

Willful ignorance, in the way I mean it, lives on the far side of that crack. You have seen. You know the argument is flawed, the opinion is half-baked, the person across from you is working from a smaller map than you are. And you choose, with full awareness, to leave it alone. Your eyes stay open while your mouth stays closed.

I want to be careful here, because I have written before about disavowal, the psychological habit of refusing to see what is in front of us so that we never have to act. That kind of looking away protects harm and lets it continue. The willful ignorance I am describing is its mature opposite. It sees everything, including harm, and it would speak in a heartbeat if harm were present. What it declines to do is spend its voice on matters where the only thing at stake is its own need to be right.

Me, Us, All of Us

The philosopher Ken Wilber, building on the moral psychology of Carol Gilligan, describes human development as a widening circle of care. The circle begins small and, given the right conditions, keeps expanding. Three of its stations are worth naming here.

The egocentric worldview is the world of me. My feelings, my perceptions and my needs sit at the centre, and everything else orbits around them. Every infant begins here, and it is entirely appropriate for an infant. In an adult it shows up as the person who experiences every disagreement as a personal attack.

Read more

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

Big love,

SB x

Yesterday I turned up to my fortnightly session with my Network Chiropractor, to tune up my body and reset after a week of teaching Spinal Attunement in Byron Bay.

I walked in and told her, “my body feels really good this week — there is nothing to really report. I feel grounded and rested and am getting incredible sleep in my new home.”

She put her hands on my body and confirmed my body felt soft, open and relaxed and ready to move a new pattern entirely.

I laid down and the minute I did, I could feel my throat and my heart start to come online, as though saying “I am ready to be worked on”.

There are much older and deeper patterns in my body that have remained unaccessible to access for many years, as surface survival patterns have dominated my body. As they do for all of us. These adaptive or survival patterns in the body often mask our deeper wounds — the unconscious patternings that sit deep in the body, in the deep rivers (channels) of the body.

In traditional chinese medicine, our lineage or ancestral patterns are held in what are known as the Eight Extraordinary Vessels, the deepest channels of the body. Classical texts describe the twelve primary meridians as rivers and canals, carrying qi through our daily lives, our digestion, our breath, our moods, our movement through the world. The extraordinary vessels sit beneath them like vast underground reservoirs. They form first in the womb, before the organs and before the primary meridians, and they carry our Jing, the essence we inherit from our parents and, through them, from every generation that came before. When the rivers flood with more than we can process, the overflow drains down into these reservoirs and waits there, sometimes for decades, sometimes for lifetimes.

The first and most foundational of these is the Chong Mai, the Penetrating Vessel. The ancient texts call it the Sea of Blood and the Sea of the Twelve Channels, because every other channel in the body draws from it. It rises from the space between the kidneys, from the womb in women, emerging at the pelvic floor and travelling up through the core of the body alongside the spine and the belly. It moves through the abdomen, fans out across the chest and the heart, climbs through the throat, wraps around the lips and reaches up toward the eyes. A descending branch runs all the way down the legs into the feet, rooting us into the earth we stand on.

Teachers in the classical lineages describe the Chong Mai as the blueprint, the very first pulse of life at the moment of conception, holding the template of who we came here to be along with everything our ancestors could not finish. Our grandmothers’ unspoken grief lives here. So do our fathers’ fear of scarcity, the hunger and the war and the migrations, the silences passed down at kitchen tables. These patterns rarely announce themselves. They sit in the deep water while the surface of the body does the louder work of keeping us safe, bracing, holding, getting through the week.

This is why the deepest work often can only begin when the body feels well. Survival patterns are loyal and tireless, and they will hold the front door for as long as they believe they are needed. Only when the nervous system is rested and resourced, when we are sleeping deeply in a home that feels like ours, does the body finally trust that it can lower the drawbridge and let the older material rise.

So when my throat and heart came online on the table, I recognised the pathway immediately. The Chong Mai moves directly through the chest and the throat, and when it begins to stir, people often feel a wave rising from the pelvis upward, a fullness behind the sternum, a tightness or opening in the throat as something ancient asks to be spoken or released. The classics even have a name for this upward surge of energy through the core. My body was telling me that the surface work was complete for now, and that the reservoir was ready to be touched.

What lives in that deep water is older than my own story. It belongs to the women and men whose blood runs through mine. When a lineage pattern finally moves through one body, it moves through all of them, upstream and downstream. And when we heal at this depth, we change what we hand on to those who come after us.

On the table yesterday, when my chiropractor started working on some of these deeper patterns, my heart started to open and process a deep reservoir of unconscious grief, and with it, I heard the words, “you are dishonouring your family”.

I saw myself as a female Samurai, almost like in Mulan.

My ancestry on my paternal grandmothers side is Chinese and often, when I am healing my deeper conditionings, I have images of myself in China.

I saw myself with a sword crossing my back.

And I also felt my Dad present.

I felt the deeper unconscious conditioning around being the first born daughter to my Chinese papa, who unconsciously also holds lineage conditionings of needing to be in “honour” — to work hard, to be responsible, to do the right thing by the family.

I felt all of the ways I feel unconscious pressure and expectation to always be in honour and do the right thing… to please my father, to not do anything that will disturb the family line.

I felt the ways in which I am still bound to this pattern in my life — even though it is deeply unconscious.

The ways in which my work is a disruption to the families peace, because they do not really understand it or see it as valuable.

Lately I have had so many people tell me I should just “go back to being a physiotherapist and treat people”.

Projections by people that do not really understand the nature of what “I do” or that are still caught in the ideology of the 9-5 mentality, where you sell your soul for profit.

I have been maddened by people’s reflections. Angered by their misunderstandings. I tell them I would rather die a slow death than go back to being a traditional practitioner in a clinic space devoid of any magic.

They don’t understand. I leave it alone.

Yesterday I got to process the deeper tensions around being misunderstood, and my fear of dishonouring my family.

I don’t know what kind of space and freedom that is going to open up in my heart, just yet, but I always know that when we do the work to heal our ancestral patterns, that magic unfolds in our lives, back and forwards in time, through the red ribbon that connects us to our ancestors.

With Love,

Sigourney Belle X

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

Big love,

SB x

Deep shame can stop the body from feeling like home. You may know it yourself: the heat that floods the face, the eyes dropping to the floor, the chest caving inward as though the heart is trying to hide behind the ribs. The breath goes shallow. Something in you leaves the room while your body stays standing in it. That leaving is the beginning of the split that I want to talk to you about today.

Shame is the most disembodying of all the emotions. The heaviest. Densest. It sits at the bottom of the Scale of Consciousness, with a frequency of just 20Hz. And it stores right down in the base of the spine, in the root system of our body — and so it is sometimes hard to access and hard to track.

Fear mobilises us, and grief, for all its weight, keeps us close to what we loved. Shame does something stranger. It turns the gaze of the whole world inward and makes the body the object of its verdict, and so the self, in an act of survival, steps outside the body to escape the sentence. We learn very young that if the flesh is the thing that is wrong, then the safest place to live is somewhere above it, in the head, in the watching mind, in the careful, managing intellect that monitors the body like a guard monitors a prisoner.

This is how the body-mind split is born Philosophy gave it a name through Descartes, and religion gave it a theology through centuries of teaching that the flesh was fallen, but in the individual psyche it is usually shame that performs the surgery. A child is humiliated for crying, for touching herself, for being too loud, too hungry, too much. The feeling is unbearable, and so the child divides. One part carries the shame and is exiled into the tissues, into the pelvis, the gut, the throat. Another part rises up and away, becoming the good one, the functional one, the one who performs. The body becomes a basement where the unbearable is stored, and the lights are switched off.

Clinically we call this dissociation. Pierre Janet described it over a century ago as a narrowing of consciousness, where parts of experience are split off and held apart from the main current of the self. Modern polyvagal work gives us the physiology: the collapse, the freeze, the dorsal shutdown that shame so often triggers. The body literally dims itself. We know from trauma research that these split-off parts do not disappear. They go on living, often with their own feelings, impulses and ways of speaking, surfacing in moments of stress as though another person has briefly taken the wheel.

The old traditions described this same terrain in a different language.

Across shamanic cultures, the idea of soul loss holds that in moments of overwhelming pain, a fragment of the soul flees the body. In the Tibetan and Vajrayana frameworks I have trained within, there is a detailed understanding of dön and other disturbing forces, which are said to find their way in through weakened vitality, broken vows, grief and emotional disturbance. The Christian mystics spoke of the soul’s inner castle, and of what happens to its gates when the one who lives inside abandons the keep. The shared intuition runs through all of them: a person who has vacated their own body has left a dwelling unattended.

In my years of clinical and esoteric work, the people who carry the deepest shame are very often the same people who describe feeling occupied. They speak of voices that are cruel in a way that feels foreign to them, of compulsions that arrive like weather, of a sense that something is living in the space they themselves have fled. From a psychological lens, we might understand these as introjects, the internalised voice of the shaming parent or the punishing church, now running on its own inside the psyche. From a mystical lens, the tradition would say that the fracture itself became a doorway, and that what moved through it has its own intelligence and its own appetite.

I hold both lenses at once, and I have stopped needing them to cancel each other out. What they agree on is the mechanism. Shame creates a vacancy. The self withdraws from the body, and the body, which was designed to be inhabited, is left open. Whatever we choose to call what enters, whether an introject, a complex, an entity or a spirit, it thrives in the dark basement where shame first put the lights out.

And so the medicine is the same, whichever language you prefer. It is the return.

Healing possession, in this understanding, begins with coming back into the house. It is the slow, tender work of re-inhabiting the tissues you were taught to leave. Breath that reaches the pelvis again. Hands laid on the belly with something closer to reverence than surveillance. Letting the exiled parts speak, letting them be witnessed without the verdict they were originally met with. Shame cannot survive being truly seen with love, because shame is, at its root, the terror of being seen and found wanting. When the one who fled comes home and turns the light on, the occupants who fed on the darkness have far less to hold on to.

The body was never the problem. It was the first place we were taught to abandon, and it remains the place where our sovereignty is restored. Every time you choose to stay present in your flesh while shame rises, you are closing a gap that something else once used as a door. You are reclaiming the house as yours, and a house with its keeper at home is a very difficult place to possess.

I offer 1:1 exorcism work as well as personalised Dark Arts training, to teach you how to work with healing this root split, to occupy your body more deeply and understand when you are being occupied by interference, or the not-self.

What I am noticing lately, is that more and more people are needing this work. As we edge towards the end of Saturns cycle in Pisces (Vedic Astrology) over the next six months, incidences of psychotic breaks will be more common. We are seeing it all over the news — Lindsey Clancy and others, who are on the collective stage, revealing to us the fragility of humanities psyche at the moment.

I am passionate about supporting people to utilise practises to eliminate external interference so that they can hear their own voice. And the loving voice of the creator, who is inherently benevolent.

If you need support with this, you can book a 1:1 session with me, below.

Clear Interference - 1:1 Exorcism

The Dark Arts

Mediumship School Training

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

Big love,

SB x

There was a period of my life where I was working at a Holistic Physiotherapy and Pilates clinic during the day, and then catching the tram down the street to lay my hands on mens bodies, to support them to come home to themselves, through Tantric Touch and practises to awaken their Eros.

I wrote a book about my secret life. Well, I am writing a couple of books.. but the first is officially LIVE.

It is called When Eros Overthrows an Empire: A Reckoning with desire, shadow and the collapse of false power. You can purchase your copy below.

Purchase When Eros overthrows an Empire

And for those of you who are paid subscribers, here is a free taster below.

Read more

Today, that story is out in the world.

When Eros Overthrows an Empire began as a memoir of my six years practising as a Tantric Dakini. By the third day of writing, the pages had started instructing me. My memories braided themselves with theology, psychology, mysticism and the unspoken shadow of Western culture, and the book became an autotheory: a map of Eros herself, sacred, suppressed, distorted, and still pulsing beneath the surface of our civilisation.

“The more we suppress desire, the more distorted it becomes. The more we shame sexuality, the more dangerous it grows. The more we exile Eros, the more violently she returns.”

The first half of the book names the poison, following the logic of suppression from Rome to the present day, through the imperial psyche and into the collective shadow. The second half asks the harder question of what it would mean to actually meet this force. It walks through the Six Gates of Return, from coming home to the body and meeting the shadow, through sacred sexuality and the artist’s way, to the return of prayer and ritual.

The book carries a foreword by Jon Eden Khan and an invocation written for it by Bruce Lyon. It is the second book in my series The Body Gospels, a four-part series that moves from the civilisational to the intimate. This first volume holds the widest lens. Each one that follows moves closer: to the body, to the room, to the breath.

“Quiet. Persistent. Unmistakable. Something is returning.”

Get your copy

With love,
Sigourney X

This has been one of the questions we get asked most frequently from people considering joining my year long medical medium cohort next year.

This is exactly the reason I have designed out the program in the way that I have.

The first month is dedicated to learning practises that open your psychic gates, as I like to call them. It is done in a way that will not completely throw you off balance — and the way that I work, turns on your very unique psychic gifts, which may or may not be the same as my own.

I work with field intelligence. That means that things wake up only when you’re ready, in the right time and sequence.

With years working in the field of neurology and also somatics, I am sensitive to processes that awaken people too quickly, that fracture them and end up leaving them ungrounded and completely adversed to the work. Too many people are trying to fast track their awakening without the resources internally to hold what moves through them. Like… a big one… the downward yin forces that oppose the yang of kundalini fire for example.

I would never prescribe kundalini practises to clients who are kidney yin depleted or in any kind of burnout. A recipe for chaos and disaster (and a healing crisis).

And in the same breath — I am also able to recognise when someone is ready to be fast tracked. I devotee to the Vajrayana Tantra path, my path initiated me early on, and quickly. I had the experience of awakening through shamanic psychosis in my early 20s and my vision opened and I ended up leaving Australia and living in a monastery, where I quickly recognised the teachings I was being given, as though I had lived within those monastery walls lifetime after lifetime. They just made sense.

Vajrayana tantra is a path or the “swift path” of awakening that can offer people enlightenment in a single lifetime. Instead of merit being accumulated across lifetimes, as within more causal paths, this path chooses initiates who are ready to access their gifts in a way that does not require endless practise or devotion to a guru. And whilst those things can be important, I acknowledge it’s not everyone’s path.

It wasn’t mine.

I didn’t do decades of cultivation work like many of my teachers to teach my gifts. They came online rapidly and I had to learn how to move with them at a pace that wasn’t comfortable.

And whilst I did a lot of the groundwork and studied under many teachers… awakening chose me before I was ready. It does for a lot of us.

And we’re living in a time that is asking a lot of us to step forwards onto a path of spiritual service, because we’re in a period of a dawning of a new epoch and an emergence of a new era. And that requires many of us to wake up from our sleep right now.

So the answer is yes. And the answer is that the field of intelligence that I orchestrate and work with in my trainings, always gives you what you need. The pace of that will be dictated by what you’re ready for.

We are now enrolling into my one year medical mediumship training and we still have three part payment plans available until November 1st.

find out more / join me

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

Big love,

SB x

I dedicate this post to my first ever spiritual teacher (in the physical world), Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who initiated me through the Lamrim— the Tibetan Buddhist path to to enlightenment. This path led me to Vajrayana Buddhism and Tantra, to which I am a devotee.

There’s something I feel called to talk about today.

Often I come onto Substack and my social media platforms and simply share about my life— my experience within my relationships, my family and things that are important to me.

I don’t often share about the depth and time I put into my spiritual practise, my lineage or the importance of the spiritual work I devote myself to.

And as the internet becomes flooded with more self help and spiritual “gurus” who love serving for the sake of material satisfaction and gain (aka. a healthy bank account balance), I feel strongly called to speak to some of the less glamorous, more hidden and subtle work that myself and many other spiritual teachers are doing, without all of the bells and whistles and accolades to show for it.

I have a love for the material — for the luxe natural latex king bed I wake up in every morning, the views of the forest that I look out into as I sip my morning tea. My wardrobe filled with silks and furs. I own and am surrounded by beautiful things, beautiful people and a life I am deeply grateful for.

And yet this is only possible for me because of the spiritual merit I have accumulated.

The nights I am woken in the night by a spirit passing over, that I light a candle and do mantra for.

Or the animal that has been hit on the side of the road, who I help pass over.

The work that I do, behind closed doors, that I do not post about — the work that I do tirelessly, for free, because it is important to my heart to do so, and it cultivates compassion and merit within my life.

And you might ask “what is spiritual merit?”

That is what I’ll unpack here.

So, what is spiritual merit?

Spiritual merit is a concept found across many contemplative traditions, most developed in Buddhist and Hindu thought, though variations appear in Christian, Islamic, and folk religious systems worldwide. At its core, it describes a kind of moral-spiritual credit accumulated through virtuous action, which shapes future circumstances, states of consciousness, or progress toward liberation.

In Buddhist traditions, merit (punya in Sanskrit, puñña in Pali) accrues through wholesome actions rooted in generosity, ethical conduct, and mental cultivation. Giving alms to monastics, practicing compassion, meditating, and studying the dharma all generate merit, which is understood to condition future rebirths and gradually clear the way toward awakening. Merit isn't quite karma in the popular Western sense of cosmic tit-for-tat; it functions more like a cultivated momentum, a quality of energy that ripens circumstances favorable to further practice and eventual liberation. Practitioners often dedicate the merit of their actions to the benefit of all sentient beings, a practice that itself is considered meritorious, since it counters the grasping, self-focused mind that merit practice is meant to dissolve in the first place.

Hindu traditions carry a related but distinct framework through the idea of punya versus papa, merit versus demerit, tied closely to dharmic action, ritual observance, and the law of karma across lifetimes. Here merit tends to be woven more tightly into cosmological bookkeeping: accumulated punya can improve one's station in future births, though the deeper aim in most schools remains moksha, liberation from the cycle altogether, which merit alone cannot secure. Right action performed without attachment to its fruits, as articulated in the Bhagavad Gita, is held as spiritually superior to merit-seeking action.

Christian and Islamic frameworks have their own cognates. Catholic theology developed a doctrine of merit tied to grace and good works, historically bound up in practices like indulgences, though shaped heavily by later Reformation critiques that emphasized grace as unearned. In Islam, the concept of thawab describes divine reward accrued through righteous deeds, prayer, and charity, weighed against sin on the Day of Judgment.

A thread running through most of these systems is the tension between merit as a subtle form of spiritual transaction and merit as something that dissolves once genuine wisdom or surrender arises. The more advanced teachings in nearly every tradition tend to point past the accounting altogether, toward action performed for its own sake rather than for what it earns.

It is unseen. It it is unpaid for. It is volunteer work, that does not give you anything material per se, but it fills you on the inside and it opens your heart.

And ironically, whilst not the point of it all, I have noticed in my own life, that it actually DOES amount to material gain. Because those with spiritual merit are often rewarded. Not always materially, as spiritual merit alone is more than enough — the rebirth into higher planes, the reduction of karma in a future life… but in my experience, it also amounts to the higher powers at be rewarding me, with material wealth and also spiritual protection.

A friend of mine, this morning posted about those with spiritual merit often being protected spiritually. This has absolutely been my experience throughout my life. I technically should be dead — I have had two near death misses in my life and am fortune, that due to very precise protection and guidance, I was able to remain on this earthly plane. I am happy to speak about these, in another post.

I also wrote about my journey of experiencing spirtual protection from harm in another recent article called, “I am protected”.

I have had people try to cast magic upon me (I have had people actually witness this and report it to me), only to later find out that they then had to deal with serious repercussions in their life — psychosis, car accidents… the list goes on. I have seen it happen a number of times.

It is through spiritual merit, that I am protected by Grace.

This conversation feels like an important one right now, because spirituality has become a commodity in the world, and people are losing meaning and forgetting about why they are practising spirituality in the first place. Spirituality is least concerned with personal enlightenment, merely for the sake of personal gain.

The Boddhisattva Path, the path in Buddhism that is called The Mahayana path, is about practising spiritual overflow and offering oneself over to the divine, for the sake of liberation of all — not just for self interest. This is the path that I was initiated onto, that I walk and that my daughter now also walks.

With love,

Sigourney Belle x

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

Big love,

SB x

I went out on a date with a gorgeous man on the weekend. It was our second date in a week. Things went really well on our first meet up — maybe you remember it, as I wrote about it just a week ago. We had dinner at a fine dining Japanese restaurant, walked the streets of Melbourne, went and saw some art and passionately made out in the middle of the bustling streets of Melbourne city. As I drove home the next day, I felt lit up and magnetic. I needed that date to pull me out of the aftermath of density that I had been swirling around in, since recently closing my two year long connection, that my heart and body had still not let go of (cue: it still hasn’t).

But on the second date, things went a little differently.

He invited me to coffee, we sat and ate arepas. It was nice.

Until I told him about what it is that I “do”

The work I practise as a psychic. The remote viewing work I am hired to do. The energy in the room changed. I could feel his gut sink.

We hugged and said goodbye — and later I received a message, “look, I just don’t think we will be compatible with the work that you do. It is too far from my reality”

I appreciated his honesty, and said “I respect that, thanks for letting me know. I feel it is best we leave things here then.”

He agreed and we moved on cleanly.

Now, the reason I want to share this with you today, is to tell you about what I have learned through this experience.

When I decided to start dating again recently, I made the decision that I would not be intimate with anyone, until I had been on a number of dates, and until there were certain tests passed.

As a deep lover, I find myself dreaming and romanticising of finding my husband, often… just after one date. I have previously, often, dove into sexual intimacy only after a couple of dates, if there is chemistry (btw, I do not date often — I have had three dates outside of my longer term connection over the past two years). I am hugely selective with who even gets through the FIRST gate and I screen people rigorously before even saying yes to a first date… because… my time and energy is precious and I don’t have capacity to waste it.

Many conversations occur before I see someone in person for the first time. There has to be a degree of compatibility, and my body has to say yes and be able to envision it happening. Hence, only having three dates in the past two years.

The second gate for me, is about developing connection, over time, through dating.

If someone is truly interested in me, they will be interested in getting to know me — outside of the bedroom.

The sexual chemistry can be strong, and I will not engage it until I have known the person over time. I don’t have an exact timeframe for that — I am still figuring that part out. What I realised on this last date though, was that I avoided future heartbreak by realising we were incompatible early on, before we had been intimate. Which is oh-so-important.

The feminine body loves to merge with a partner. Even just after one sexual intimate encounter.

For me in particular, being deeply sensitive and also having a constitution that is 80% water, I am a merger.

Dakini by nature (ahem, if this interests you, you should definitely read my latest book that will be releasing this week — When Eros Overthrows an Empire: a reckoning with desire, the shadow and collapse of false power), I do not go into intimate connection lightly. Intimacy for me, is like swimming in the dark waters of the cosmos. And for my counterpart: it is never just body-body physical experience. It is deeply spiritual, transcendent and enlightening. And so unless they are ready for that encounter (and the obliteration of the ego that comes with it), then it is best they walk on by.

Dating now feels much more empowering.

I know who I am, I know what I desire and I am not willing to settle.

There are gates they must pass through, to access me.

My eros has matured. I understand the importance of slowing down and titrating how available it is to others, now. Something I talk about intimately in my recent book release, The Shape that Love Refuses to Take: Love as Magnum Opus

Chemistry is beautiful.

But chemistry burns through into dust that has no further ability to transform to gold, if there is no grounds for longevity — shared values, a sense of shared vision, physical, emotional, soul and spiritual compatibility — in the connection.

With love,
SB. X

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

Big love,

SB x

I am sitting here this morning, sipping on my morning Latte, a little bit sleepy headed from a late night out in Melbourne.

This morning, I am reminded of the magic of Melbourne again. It lost its spark when the pandemic hit and has been slowly creeping back to life ever since.

I drove past my old studio this morning in Collingwood, where I used to practise with men as a Dakini.

My heart, my belly and my sex pulsing alive today, as I pondered the art of being a well loved woman.

I was taken out to dinner last night on a first date, to a nice Japanese restaurant. I am always pleasantly surprised at my capacity to find beautiful men through the ethers of social media. I have an antennae that is able to radically detect those that are genuine, heart felt men, from those that are not. I have only had really positive experiences dating through the apps — not many experiences (only four to date over the past three years), but all have amounted in either a lovership, a relationship, or a friendship.

I don’t believe that dating apps are only full of men looking to extract from women. Most of the time I am swiping left — just from a single glance, I can tell if I have a connection with someone. This is the power of being anchored and resourced in your feminine body — your home — your heart and eros. You just… know.

So, last night, I had an incredible set menu, followed by a sweet walk, with hand holding and a cheeky makeout session in the middle of the streets of Melbourne.

I was reminded that I need more of this.

When I feel well loved, my whole being emanates in a way that I know can change worlds and realities in a single moment. Life has more colour — it glows differently. Everything moves and feels in flow again (everything that seemed to be wrong, magically dissolves in weight and somehow feels like it no longer has a grip on me).

So this is your reminder: do something today that brings you back into your feminine body. Maybe it’s not a date night. Maybe it’s simply buying flowers for yourself, or doing something that inspires beauty.

You are worth it.

With Love,

SB. X

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

Big love,

SB x

Subscribe now

This morning I had a little moment over my morning tea, that warmed my heart, and I want to share it with you.

It started out as a text. My ex lover messaged me to say thankyou for the care package I had dropped him at his building site this morning.

I can’t really put into words how much I love this man. And whilst he doesn’t have capacity to show up for a relationship, there is still a part of me that feels like I have been contracted here, to remind him of love.

I believe we sign these contracts before we come down here.

Some of us are assigned as Earthbound angels to others, to offer ourselves to them to help them remember who they are.

Pop psychology says that love should be reciprocal. It puts love into boxes.

But love is not something you give with any hope of receiving something. Love is a source of radiation that comes from within — it is a field. It does not give expecting it will receive something back. In relationships, we need some conditions in order to be fulfilled, but this is not true of love itself.

Love just is.

And by it’s very nature, it is a force of receivership.

I know when I have been contracted to love someone, because it is effortless. Like in this instance — I feel full giving to him and knowing I am being in service to him.

I have this with other people in my life too. It fuels me to love them. It fuels me to give to them, without expecting anything in return.

And I have known this to be true, of people offering to me in this way before too.

We are Earthbound Angels — and the more we can come out of the scarcity of needing to receive something in order to just simply be and give love, the more that we learn that our very nature, is that of love itself.

Today, try and do something for someone around you, out of pure generosity. Buy a stranger a coffee or carry an elderly persons groceries to their car. We can train this way of being into ourselves through small acts of kindness.

Love does not care for agreements, it just wants to be experienced in its boundless, infinite nature.

This is the theme of my latest book, The Shape That Love Refuses to Take: Love as Magnum Opus

I hope, today, that this acts as your reminder to transcend the smaller self and come into some form of selfless service. Or that you are on the receiving end of such generosity.

Big love,

SB x

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

Big love,

SB x

This was a topic that passed through my mind today.

I was thinking about ducking in, to have a reading with one of my mentors.

Then I thought, “no, actually, this is not a time to have anyone else look into what’s happening for you, Sigourney. This is a time to cultivate trust in your own knowing.”

I have mixed thoughts and feelings about seeing psychics. I think most people are probably similar.

I mean, I am one myself. But I have a very specific niche and practise and will not just see anyone for any little thing. I work mostly, as a Medical Intutive and also with business owners and entrepreneurs as a Business Intuitive.

I do not work as a spirit medium.

I have spirits and passed ones that come to me — and if they do, I am happy to relay messages. But I will never invoke them. And I will never go into readings with the intention to connect with them. I do not summon anything.

I work with what comes to me and what WANTS to reveal itself as a natural organic process of tuning into somebodies body + field.

I recently had someone ask me if I could teach spirit mediumship and my honest answer was no. It felt unethical. Sure, I can do it. But I do not practise that myself, so there is no way I would teach someone else to do it.

There is a difference between being able and capable of doing something vs. actually doing it. I learned this the hard way when I took on two psychic forensic cases some years ago. I ended up surrogating the killer’s psychological makeup too heavily and developed paranoia for a couple of days. I realised, with the nature of how I practise as a psychic, that the work in that space was not for me. We are all constitutionally and elementally designed differently as psychics and have different gifts. As someone that has an astrology chart that is 80% water, I become the person that I am working on. Water rules the emotional body and felt senses. That means I feel everything kinaesthetically and adopt their psychological nature as though it is my own.

I have had to learn to have immaculate boundaries — something I did not have in my early 20’s when I started this work. It is what now makes me an excellent teacher of this work and harnessing one’s individual psychic gifts is what I teach within my Medimship School — One Year Training. Applications are now open and early bird closes September 1st. The link to find out more or apply is here.

When it comes to discerning whether you need to see a psychic, or whether a particular psychic is right for you, I always get people to tune into their somatic knowing — what is happening within your body when you tune into a reader? Do you feel a calm settled upwelling of a yes, or is there a sense of fear and anxiety in your system?

Not all psychics are geniune, good at what they do… or grounded.

In fact, most are not grounded.

The reality is that when our psychic senses are more active, we are more sensitive, and we are also more permable to the world around us. We take more on via osmosis. And most psychics are, quite literally, full of shit.

I say this not to critique the whole industry / everyone inside of it, but my experience has been that most people offering this kind of work are not doing their own work. They do not have sufficient energy hygeine practises in place. They do not know how to discern what is geniune / trickster energy. They do not have sufficient boundaries and often share things that are totally off, or against a client’s consent.

I am all about ethical practise, and the reality is, that most psychics do not have a background in any kind of arena where they have had to learn about basic client consent and boundaries.

This is important to me, and a big topic of conversation within my one year mediumship training.

So, before you see someone, it is worth breathing into your body and belly and asking where that impulse is coming from. And if you want recommendations of practitioners who are grounded, doing their own work and have good discernment, I am always open to making those recommendations and connections, and soon too will have a cohort of practitioners I can refer you on to.

With love,

SB. X

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

Big love,

SB x

This past week (ever since the new moon and full solar eclipse) has been incredibly dark for me.

Eclipses are times where we are meant to sink into uncertainty, where things that were previously “known” start to dissolve. A time for being in the void. A time for letting ourselves and our lives rearrange themselves.

For me, this eclipse has been a particularly big one, as it fell at 20degrees of Leo and my South Node sits at 21 degrees, in conjunction with my Ascendant at 23 degrees Leo. Not only that, but it was squaring my Sun-Pluto-Mercury conjunction at 17 degrees of Scorpio.

Leo, ruled by the sun, rules our vitality and life force energy. With the sun being eclipsed in it’s own sign, it means that our vitality has been dampened. If you too have placements around that 20degree mark of Leo (17degrees-23degrees) or any of the other fixed signs in those degrees, it may have impacted your physical health and wellbeing too.

The fixed cross in Astrology (Leo — Aquarius, Scorpio — Taurus) is the cross of Alchemy. The tetramorph maps directly onto this — Lion, Eagle (Scorpio's higher octave), Man, Bull are Ezekiel's four living creatures, later absorbed into the four evangelists, and they sit at the four fixed points of the zodiacal wheel. In alchemical iconography this same grouping often surrounds the philosopher's stone or the completed Work — the four elements stabilized around a center, no longer transmuting but holding. That's the difference between the Cardinal Cross (initiation, ignition) and the Fixed Cross: Cardinal is the volatile phase, Fixed is coagulation. Sulfur and Salt both belong more naturally here than Mercury does — Leo carries something of Sulfur's solar, combustible soul-principle, Taurus carries Salt's inert, crystallized body-principle.

Fixation can mean mastery or it can mean rigidity, and the fixed signs carry both — the stone that holds power and the stone that refuses to move. With the South node eclipsing 20degrees Leo, we are having a powerful force eclipse the centre of our hearts — the seat of our Soul. So this eclipse is a Soul initiation in many senses.

But also, the sun has gone dark. Meaning that we have been asked to steer away from the light and into the caves of our being, to let parts of the soul decompost and resettle into something new.

My particular astrological chart is nearly entirely fixed, and so this past week, parts of me that have been immovable for a long time, have let go.

When I go into the dark, I really descend.

Just yesterday, everything felt incredibly bleak in my life. I often descend into suicidal ideation when things get really dark and I cannot find any source of spark of light inside of me. This morning, as I drink tea from bed, I feel inspired to share with you how I move through these journeys and layers of my psyche when I am in this space.

Subscribe now

1. I don’t fight the darkness, I create space for it. Space to rest. Space to be in my “cave”. I rest. I dream. I sleep. I collapse. I cry. I give myself the space to go into what is present for me.

2. When I start to dip into the program of “I don’t want to live”, I always ask myself which part of myself is dying. Usually, it is a part of my personality that is losing grip of itself and is dying. I don’t intellectualise this enquiry, I just sit with it and I get curious about it.

3. I ask myself, what part of my life is outdated? For me, right now, it is my isolation program. My tendency to retreat and do everything alone. This winter has been a long, arduous descent and I have had to admit to myself that I am fucking lonely. It is comfortable, but it is lonely. And I am responsible for changing that.

4. I drink high quality, medicinal tea, like Liu Bao or Sheng pu-erh every morning in silent ritual and I ask my body to heal and clear itself. Coffee first thing in the morning is minerally depleting, bad for the gut and it floods the body with cortisol within minutes — it hijacks the adrenal glands, borrows energy from tomorrow to spend today. It primes the nervous system for output, for doing, for pushing through. Tea works on a slower current. The L-theanine in aged tea leaves works alongside the caffeine, not against it, producing a steadier, calmer alertness rather than a spike. My mornings are not for pushing. They are for asking my body what it needs, and tea lets me stay in that question instead of rushing past it.

5. I make sure I am nurtuting my body. Yesteryday I got bodywork and moved some of the deeper layers of tension. The day before I sat in my local mineral spa and gave myself permission to stare endlessly into the woods. Esoterically we say that the body-mind are one. So when we release tension from the body, we are simultaneously working on our mind layers.

6. I work with plant allie supports to help me lift my spirit and see things from a higher perspective… or see the things I cannot quite see for myself — for me, these past few days, it has been Blue Lotus and Microdosing small amounts of psylocibin. Not to escape, not to numb — but to loosen the grip of my own perspective just enough to let something wider in. Allies, not substances. There is a difference there — maybe you can feel it in the wording.

7. Normally I would also say, time in nature… moving the body in nature. Moving the body in whatever way feels good. For me, currently, that is nearly impossible as I have some kind of flu, paired with exhaustion and a broken toe. So it has been missed pilates classes and small, 100m walks to my tolerance, in the forest for me… but normally, this is one of my main remedies. Bare feet on the earth, breathing her through my body. Endorphin and endocannabinoids releases through a strong physical practise (not to mention the other myriad of natural antidepressants exercise modulates, like serotonin for example).

8. Hugs. Contact Dance. Oxytocin through touch. Human connection (if and when that feels right… sometimes I find connection to be distracting, if someone cannot meet me in the silence and the darkness… which is a rare quality to possess). I personally know that often when I am moving through something so old and ancient, like I am right now, that I just need to be held. I need a silent loving space of connection. I need to be nurtured. Cooked for. Looked after. I have a handful of people I know I can call upon for this kind of connection.

9. Prayer. Asking for spirit to descend and hold me through the darkness. Ask for it to show me my blindspots. Ask for grace to return.

10. Remembering this too shall pass. Everything is always moving, changing. Nothing stagnating unless we hold on too tightly. Keep breathing, keep letting your body move to the beat of change. You will move through this.

I am still very much so in the grips of this darkness, but I am slowly moving through it one breath at a time.

And if you are journeying through something similar — I know many of you are at this time — I hope this helps. Eclipses are dark. They are designed that way. We are in the portal for another week.

Breathe.

Warm love,

SB. X

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

Big love,

SB x

My article Loving an Avoidant has been my most popular article yet.

And so I thought I would follow up here with a sequel piece.

I have been sitting with the notion of being avoidant, cross referencing these words with my own experiences of dating one for the past two years.

And something that I can tell you, is that it is a radical oversimplification, and does not really do justice to the complexities of what the “avoidance” is really all about.

Read more

Paid subscribers get early (and full) access to new essays, occasional behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m working throu…

Read more

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

Big love,

SB x

I am sharing this topic with you today, in the light of a miracle healing.

You may have read, but two nights ago, I broke my toe. Dreary eyed and sleepy after having a strong dose of Blue Lotus tincture before bed, I went to put another log of red gum on the fire and instead of placing it on the fire, I dropped it on my toe.

Red gum is… heavy. And this wood was sharp.

And apart from a lot of blood, my toe went bluish black and I could not stand or walk on it. And so I crawled my way to the bathroom, got some steri strips and in a haze, I bandaged it up and put myself back to bed.

In the morning, I woke up, still unable to walk and having to now clean up the pools of blood I left around the house.

I have never broken a bone in my life. I have always been blessed in that regard. And when I looked at my toe the next day, I knew it was broken. I have assessed that many fractures in my life, that I know a broken bone when I see one.

Soon after I shared about it, my good friend Jo’el was in my inbox.

“Yo, want me to work on that for you?”

Now, I am not one to let many people “work on me”.

I am extremely selective about who I let in to practise on me — particularly because I have my own magic. And it works.

But I know Jo’el and he is the real deal. I gladly accepted.

He called in a number of Saints and immediately I could feel my toe start to get hot and it started to throb. It was working.

I spent the day in bed sipping Gaba Oolong tea, covering my toe in Arnica cream and dosing up on blue lotus tincture (it is an incredible analgesic / anti-inflammatory and contains alkaloids — mainly nuciferine, and reportedly some apomorphine).

My toe felt about 30% better after he practised on me and that night, I had a CBD gummy and dropped out into the deepest slumber.

And in the morning, I woke up and I could walk. I could barely even feel my toe. Sure, it was still bruised and still had a deep cut through the centre of it… but I was walking, and nearly entirely pain free.

This practise of miracle healing is called Medical Thaumaturgy, and I want to speak to you about it, because it is underutilised — and still reasonably frowned upon by those who “need scientific evidence” for everything in order to validate it to be true.

And look, I have a science degree and I am a researcher. The science is important. But all of the greatest scienticists have always bowed to the mysteries of Spirit. Just look at Einstein for example, who said:

Medicine has a long history of "it works but we don't know why yet" — aspirin was in use for decades before salicylate pathways were understood, lithium for mood stabilization for over a century before anyone had a working theory of why.

Isaac Newton, reportedly near the end of his life, quoted":

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

So, what is Medical Thaumaturgy?

“Thaumaturgy" comes from the Greek thauma (wonder) + ergon (work) — literally "wonder-working."

It's the term traditionally used for miracle-working or magical healing, especially in a religious or folk-magic context. A "thaumaturge" is a wonder-worker: someone who performs seemingly supernatural feats, often through invoked divine power, ritual, or esoteric technique rather than mechanical or purely material means.

Medical Thaumaturgy or Medical Magic is the practise of miracle work applied to the body.

There are many ways to practise this kind of miracle work and perhaps one of the most well known Medical Thaumaturge is our good friend Jesus.

The gospels are a thaumaturgic case file. The blind man at Bethsaida. The woman with the hemorrhage who touches his cloak in a crowd and is healed before he even turns around. Lazarus, four days dead, called back out of the tomb.

But the gift got franchised

The Church didn’t let that power stay singular for long. In Acts and the Pauline letters, healing becomes one of the charismata — an enumerated spiritual gift, sitting alongside prophecy and speaking in tongues, available to anyone properly initiated into the body of the church. This is the hinge the entire later history swings on. Thaumaturgy stops being the property of one man and becomes a transferable institutional capacity. It can be granted. Which means it can also be withheld.

The desert fathers ran with this. Anthony the Great, Gregory Thaumaturgus — literally nicknamed the Wonder-Worker — built the template of the ascetic healer: withdraw from your own flesh through fasting, celibacy, isolation, and somehow that withdrawal grants you authority over other people’s flesh. Deny the body, and you earn power over bodies. Suffering becomes the entry fee for the right to heal.

When the wonder-worker becomes a relic

Living wonder-workers are a problem for an institution, though. A charismatic healer can found a rival sect, preach heterodox doctrine, accumulate a following that answers to him rather than to Rome. A relic can’t do any of that. So the power gets rerouted into objects — bones, cloth, splinters of the True Cross, water from a particular well — and pilgrimage economies grow up around them. Healing becomes something you travel toward and pay tribute for, rather than something a person does to you directly. The wonder stays real. The custody of it changes hands.

The split

And then there was a fracture point. From the twelfth century on, universities in Salerno, Bologna, and Paris start reintroducing Galenic and Arabic medicine to Europe, and a formal medical profession begins competing with the Church for jurisdiction over the body. Rome’s response is twofold: absorb what it can — monasteries doubling as hospitals, monk-physicians — and draw a harder line around what it can’t. Canonized saints, sanctioned by Rome, keep their miracles. Folk healers, cunning-women, herbalists working outside that structure get recoded, gradually and then very fast, as something illicit.

This is where medical thaumaturgy splits into a licensed channel and a suppressed one. And it is not incidental that the suppressed channel becomes heavily gendered.

The witch trials as enforcement

The Malleus Maleficarum and the witch-hunt apparatus that follows it can be read as the violent conclusion of that split. Midwives, folk healers, women with plant knowledge — unlicensed thaumaturgy, criminalized precisely because it was healing power operating outside institutional control. The phenomenology is identical to what got Christ called divine: touch, cure, wonder attributed to a body. The only variable that changed was authorization. A woman doing it without a bishop’s blessing was doing witchcraft. A man doing it with one was doing God’s work.

The miracle retreats

By the Enlightenment, mechanistic physiology starts taking over the explanatory territory medicine used to share with religion. The Church doesn’t abandon thaumaturgy so much as fence it into an increasingly narrow, increasingly bureaucratized category. Lourdes builds its own medical tribunal — the Bureau des Constatations Médicales — to certify cures as medically inexplicable before the Church will call them miraculous. Canonization starts requiring the same kind of evidentiary standard. The miracle, which used to sit comfortably alongside medicine for over a millennium, now has to defend itself against medicine to be believed at all.

Where we are now

Faith healing. Charismatic laying-on-of-hands. The whole contemporary energy-healing and biofield-science milieu — this is, in a sense, an attempt to re-suture what the Enlightenment split apart. To reclaim hands-on, wonder-adjacent healing without the institutional gatekeeping that once decided whose touch counted as miracle and whose counted as heresy.

The body was never actually neutral ground. It has always been contested territory, and the wonder-work done on it has always been a question of who’s allowed to do it, and who has to burn for trying.

And this is what I teach, both within my Spinal Attunement trainings and my year long Medical Mediumship Training.

I teach about the body as a ground for miracles, not just something we inhabit and “fix” mechanistically when things go “wrong”.

The body is a vessel for the divine. And I train Healers to become miracle workers. That is where my work differs from others.

I am currently enrolling in both my 5 day Spinal Attunement Practitioner Training in Byron Bay at the gorgeous Temple Farmhouse (just four spaces remain). You can find out more / apply here.

And the the 12 Month Medical Mediumship training I run (which is more like an apprenticeship, by the way, as I teach you everything that I know…), is where I share on this topic more deeply and also invite in guest speaker Jo’el Adifon to share about the work that he does in this field as a Thaumaturge. The doors are now open for applications and early bird ends September 1st.

You can find out more / apply here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A clean house, a clean mind.

The internal reflects the external.

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

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

Some would call it OCD.

I call it energetic hygeine.

I mean, it is what I teach.

As within, so without.

And the opposite is also true.

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

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

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

SB. X

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

Big love,

SB x

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

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

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

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

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

The context.

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

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

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

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

What CB-PTSD actually is

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

The numbers are not marginal.

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

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

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

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

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

Birth is a bodily event before it is anything else

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

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

What treating birth as trauma would actually require

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big love,

SB x

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

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

Ahhh, so true, I thought.

A big exhale and breath out: he gets it.

In fact, I love most of what he shares.

Because this has been medicine for me.

Envy, that is.

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

It has been one of my most prized golden shadows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The projection trap

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

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

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

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

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

The practice

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

Subscribe

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or join me in 2027, here.

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

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

This client was one of my favourites.

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

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

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

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

She was consciously telling me she wanted to live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working with her, humbled me.

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

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

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

I wish all people to know this about death.

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