Blog - Primal Happiness -

OAK

By Lian Brook-Tyler

Oak,
you saw it
all.

The girl who didn’t know who she was,
grimacing behind a contorting mask of someone else.

The woman who grasped for control,
never trusting life could take care of her.

The human who thought she was alone,
believing only what she could see.

Oak,
you were
everything.

The girl grew up,
taught by your telos.

The woman let go,
surrendered to your presence.

The human opened
to you and therefore everything.

If I spend a lifetime on my knees
kissing your feet,
it won’t be enough.
So instead,
I guide the lost ones
to you,
so you can show them who they are.
The ocean of their tears at your roots,
is my praise.

Oak,
this is your legacy,
it is for the acorns
and
for the girls and boys
to come.
It is
for all of us.
🌳🙏♥️

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IT’S BOTH 🧬

By Lian Brook-Tyler

I first noticed myself disappear in a coaching session 9 years ago.

I was sitting with a client and realised I hadn’t been there for most of the session – which of course means I’d come back to be able to notice the absence.

I’d been there but not really in the way I’d always known it, it was without a constant chatter of…

“What shall I say next?”

“I wonder what I’ll make for dinner.”

“Can I look at the time without him knowing?”

And yet, I’d been listening and responding all the time anyway.

That disappearance became more and more my usual experience until one day, maybe five years ago, I was standing in my kitchen and realised I was about to “flip over”, to let go of thought, or at least self referential thought, altogether. To be in stillness.

I can’t tell you how I knew that, it’s a language beyond words but I knew.

This is the Holy Grail of ascension spirituality.

And quickly and easily, I said NO.

I wanted to stay here with my feet on the ground.

I wanted to remain a wife and mother and somehow I knew that required a NO.

Then I found myself travelling in a completely different direction, I’ve descended into matter and I’ve fallen in love with shadow.

A friend called me Queen of the Underground (from Dead Flowers by The Rolling Stones) this week and he was accurate. Death holds no fear for me, the dark is my friend and my most profound shamanic initiation has been into the Below, to be held by Mother Earth. I knew I was home.

And yet, also this week several students separately spoke about how they experienced me as ascended, floating above, one compared me to a past teacher who was enlightened.

It was a surprise, almost an insult, and yet… I realise finally, it’s not.

If the Oak, the Rose, the Bee and the Mushroom have shown me anything it’s… both.

The Divine and the human.

I still disappear… in circle, when sitting with someone listening, in ritual and in ceremony.

And I’m still fully in the matter… in the emotions, the mud, the blood, the sweat and the tears. So many tears..

My medicine, my gift, my deepest devotion is Union.

Of course it’s both.

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Sweet darkness 🖤

By Lian Brook-Tyler

“You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.”

These words from David Whyte’s Sweet Darkness, one of my favourite poems, are playing around my mind today.

In order to create what our heart desires, we also need to release what it doesn’t but that we’ve understandably, innocently clung to for security, approval and control.

The releasing is rarely easy but it becomes more and more a choiceless choice as we begin to see the shimmering spires, mythical beasts and enchanted woods of the world to which we belong.

We see that world more clearly from a place we most fear and will resist going to, and yet…

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

Art: Cat Girl by Frank Frazetta

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This is what busy looks like 🌹

By Lian Brook-Tyler

This week has been one of the most intense I’ve experienced for a long time… we’re in the final (final, final!) stages of rebirthing as Waking The Wild, inside and out, as well as every part of our ongoing business needing attention. As Jonathan described it: it feels like we’re surrounded by hungry mouths that need feeding.

Not much more than 10 years ago that would have had me…

Fear-fantasising on what could go wrong

Hyper-focusing on “how”

Double down on doing

Barking orders to unfortunate souls who dared to come close

Feeling resentful for always having to “be the one who handles everything”

Meanwhile the shadows creating those behaviours would have been speaking physically too, via heart palpitations, panic attacks and chronic facial pain burning away in my jaw

Whereas this week…

I’ve focused (and refocused when fear showed up) on what I desire

I’ve allowed magic synchronicities to show me the way

I’ve had as much play and rest as usual (actually more: I was at the spa on Monday), and only taken action when it’s aligned

I’ve told and shown family, friends, team members, clients and students and podcast guests how much I love them

I’ve felt full of appreciation for all the support I have

I recorded my ROSE mantra (Relax, Open, Soften, Express) for the women in our Medicine and Sovereign circles, and I meant every word of it because that’s how my body feels

When I speak of the rose-infused, rose-tinted way I live it isn’t just fanciful, whimsical frippery (not that I’m knocking that: I’m here for it), it is the most practical and effective way I know to create whatever I want whilst feeling wonderful.

And these days, it’s the ‘feeling wonderful’ part that matters most to me, knowing it’s for the highest good of all.

I’m unashamed to say that Spirit of the Rose has had her way with me and I’ll happily live and die held in her blooms.

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A Peak of the Glorious Wild

By Lian Brook-Tyler

I see an Italian tree in front of me. I thought it was a cypress but Google says no.

It calls to mind a summer spent sleeping under a fig tree in Ibiza. A summer of sun, sand, nudity, and living hand to mouth via the medium of art, graft and ingenuity. I was 7.

My father and his then-girlfriend Jacky, painted portraits of holiday makers and the now-cliched Ibizan sun sets and flower fairies.

Sometimes he used those polymath hands to break granite or pick apricots.

We dined on eclectic vegetarian concoctions of vegetables, packet soup, rice or potatoes and marmite (for umami and B12) cooked over a camp fire.

Ants stole our food and we accepted it as a price for wild living. I notice that people now don’t quite understand my calm when ants invade my kitchen. Maybe there’s part of me that enjoys their cheeky familiarity.

I remember my surprise at seeing my first unfamiliar penis… It belonged to a man strolling along the nudist beach. I was particularly impressed with the fetching foreskin he was sporting (the only other grown penis I’d seen belonged to my father, who was circumcised).

I suspect I asked a lot of questions on that day.

One day I found a t-shirt on the beach. Quite plain, probably a boy’s though I had little care for gender norms then. That became a staple part of my very-capsule wardrobe that year.

Talking of wardrobes, when we moved from the fig tree (or rather, were moved, the police decided that it wasn’t quite right this strange English family sleeping under a tree next to the beach) to a nearby field belonging to a welcoming farmer, my father built me a bedroom.

I was so proud of that room, crafted from an oil drum and tarpaulin… it was my first private space for some time, it still holds a sweet place in my heart.

As well as my new room, our new neighbourhood provided fresh almonds (so delicate and green), pine needles to throw on the fire (“fireworks”!), an outsize pig with whom I spent hours conversing, and most exciting of all… a rubbish tip! Decades later, my mother’s house still contains a knife I found there. Come to think of it, I’m not sure she ever knew its provenance.

So yes, my Ibizan stay can be recalled by material things but it’s the feeling I remember most of all, though struggle to put into words that have currency in our culture…

It’s something to do with being nourished, held safe and loved by the bounties of this world.

We threw ourselves on the mercy of a strange island and its inhabitants, and were fed, watered and most of all… seen and accepted in all of our full, weird glory.

When the film Captain Fantastic came out, multiple friends told me to watch it, knowing I’d love it.

And yes, I did! It somehow captured at least some of that feeling. I wondered how they knew.

Maybe it’s because we all have our own sense of that glorious wild, sovereign feeling of everything (including ourselves) being Absolutely Good Enough, which can be evoked by a story, a taste, a smell, or a tree that’s not a cypress.

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