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Creating your life through priming your mind

This picture, a print of Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose was a wedding present from my husband 11 years ago, it hangs on our bedroom wall and reminds me daily of the dreamy, poetic and soulful way that I’m devoted to living.

This post isn’t just about this picture though, it’s about one of the powerful ways I create my being and therefore my very life.

I read an article years ago by the personal growth genius Steve Pavlina about the power of priming your mind.

Even though I was deep in spiritualising the heck out of life at the time (“Everything is an illusion.”), the idea still grabbed me.

I guess as someone whose top strength, according to the VIA strengths survey, is The Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence (yes, really… it’s officially a strength!) I didn’t require much convincing to put even more conscious attention on what I was surrounding myself with.

So I went about creating an environment that looked and felt beautiful, magical and wild.

Very little of what’s in my surroundings now is there by chance alone – from the pictures, desk and tech (and altar, feathers and crystals, natch) in my studio to the fairy houses, old fashioned roses and wild spaces in our garden… it’s all created in alignment with my vision.

Interestingly, I’ve never talked about any of this directly with my husband (he’s just always thought that I’m OCD about my environment) and yet he was using the printer in my studio the other day and then afterwards said that he noticed how intentional it all seemed, that there appeared to be a reason for everything that was placed there… “It’s like a reinforcement of who you are.”

Ah, maybe The Soul of the Rose has come to life.

How are you devoted to living? And how is your environment priming for that?

A homage to the hidden and often misunderstood precious gold of projections

“Who does she think she is?” Projections: what they mean about you and them

I’ll begin this homage to the hidden and often misunderstood precious gold of projections by sharing some of what I’ve heard said about me – either first-hand (after they’d changed their minds about me!) or repeated to me by a person they’d shared them with.

Firstly, here’s a couple of descriptions of me dating back to when I was at college:

“Snobby”
“Up herself”

You’ll see how this theme continued, with a classic from the baby years, when I was trying to make friends with other new mothers:

“She thinks she’s better than everyone.”

Not exactly what I wanted potential (and much-needed) new friends to think about me. These comments used to hurt, confuse and worry me. I knew I didn’t think I was better than anyone (in fact, mostly I was just trying to figure out how to navigate the world without revealing myself to be a complete weirdo!) so why did I keep giving that impression?

How I looked?
How I spoke?

Something else? However much I analysed it, I never seemed to be able to understand, let alone change, this perception of me from people who didn’t really know me. It’s taken many years (and a lot of work to discover and rewild who I really am) to see that as much as I didn’t think I’m better than other people, I do (as is the case for others who came here to lead, disrupt, innovate, whilst paradoxically reclaiming the ancient ways too) have a sense of being different. I’m strange and otherworldly. I’m unable to fit in, be ‘normal’ and one of the crowd, even when I really, really want to… because of course I’m not meant to. It’s not my path.

And even today people continue to think these things about me, though now they’re even more pointed because, as I said in my post last week, the more revealed you are, the more impactful you are and the more the projections on you will increase in number and intensity, Inception-style.

Last week, the fiery Truth-Teller Sara generously shared her past opinions of me…

“Who does she think she is?”
“She’s a big headed know it all.”
“Oh look at her all glam and priestess-like”.

Sara also said… “Perhaps what was happening was seeing what I’d very skilfully placed in shadow, and how dare it be flouncing around like it’s ok to be like that in the world?”

Yes! She was watching me in the world and in doing so was risking bringing into the light of consciousness her very own wise, radiant and powerful priestess. That was something she wasn’t yet ready for, so she turned away, disgusted. Sometimes we’re self aware enough to know we’re not ready for that level of threat to our nice safe identity so we steer away from even allowing ourselves to be in enough connection with a person to feel the full power of our projections onto them.

As my precious client Tracey shared with me… “I steered away a little because I felt I would be jealous of your life if I got close to you, so I suspected I would get triggered and I wasn’t up for it. I wasn’t triggered from my ‘safe distance’ ”. And then she was ready to feel her own power to create an enviably blessed life so she was willing to come closer to me. So close that we’ve spent the past ten months working together in various Waking The Wild crucibles… and she’s now birthing her own much-needed wild medicine into the world.

How about you?

What are you projecting onto others (maybe me!) – what does that say about your own hidden gold? And what are others projecting onto you – what does that say about the parts of you that maybe you’re not yet claiming as the gift you are to the world?

P.S. If you’re feeling the call to see how I can help you become your magic, follow your next breadcrumb to Waking The Wild Medicine

N.B. Everything I’ve shared here from Sara and Tracey is with their permission and with deep gratitude for their courage and vulnerability (two sides of the same coin) to share it with me and then to say YES to me sharing what they said with you.

7 things I’ve learned from 7 years running my (soul-led) business

Written by Lian Brook-Tyler

To create a business, a real business – the beautiful, fantastical, edgy af, playful and love-fuelled one that your soul is inconveniently calling you to – takes time. Time to hear your soul’s call, time to find the courage to heed it and then a lot more time than you believe at the start that you can or will give it before it ‘works’.
And then a few years in, you realise there’s no alternative to giving it as long as it takes… after all, this was a soul choice… it’s your very life on the line and therefore it might well take a lifetime.
You will spend several years thinking you’re missing something, maybe a funnel, a new coaching methodology or a better niche, until gradually it dawns on you that the only thing that’s missing is you.
Which brings us to… when you finally dare to strip bare, dropping the mask, losing the armour and revealing your heart… something incredible happens, it all finally starts to work. It looks like magic (it is… *your* magic).
And then the projections come. The more you reveal yourself, the more impact you have and the more people will project on you – positively and negatively. I’m a Divine Queen to some and a Drama Queen to others. The font of all knowledge to some, a know-it-all to others. Sovereignty is being in deep relationship to all of it, knowing it’s all material for your liberation, whilst knowing it was never about you anyway.
Finally you’re *there*… six figures, multiple six figures, seven figures, or whatever the amount of Monopoly money you needed to play with to realise that the material girl in a material world is a gloriously clever, creative part of you but still, only a very small part.
Then you see that you can be, do and have anything.

You make it look so sick-makingly, ridiculously, enviably easy because by this point you’re playing the game, knowing it’s a game and that you’re the table, the board, the playing pieces, the player, your opponents and the games designer. And if there’s a designer of the games designer, you’re that too. So you create that game however you darn well fancy.

Maybe it’s in a pink and turquoise rose print, accessorised with speckled feathers you found on your walk and with a drinks machine dispensing cocktails or Assam tea depending on your mood.

With a magical chair with just the right mix of wild and sumptuous, say oak and velvet, that gives anyone who sits in it a taste of their own divinity and at the same time, welcomes every bit of the soft animal of their humanity.

Which of course, they’ll pedestalise you for and demonise you for.

And you just keep loving them anyway, making art and playing your game (which is all really the exact same thing)… what else is there to do?

Then you realise that it’s what your soul was saying all those years ago at #1.

P.S. If you’re feeling the call to see how I can help you become your magic, follow your next breadcrumb to Waking The Wild Medicine

The things you wish for… are you ready to run your gauntlet?

The Gauntlet

People often say to me “I wish I could do [insert thing I appear to do easily 🙂] like you.”

The things they wish for range from creating content like podcasts and fb posts to how I enrol, coach and teach.

The truth is NONE of those things have come easily for me even though all of them are sourced from my deepest gifts.

I’m naturally adept at speaking directly to people’s wild souls, manifesting exactly what I desire in a way that looks like magic (maybe because it is), seeing people’s deepest gifts, understanding complex patterns and articulating all of those things in the spoken and written word… they are all aspects of my deepest gifts.

What’s made it incredibly challenging for me is:

I worry about what people think of me… it’s only very recently that it’s felt safe for me to be seen in anything close to my full power.
I doubt my abilities a lot… It’s taken most of my life to even begin to accept my deepest gifts (I see other’s much more easily).
I’ve struggled with a host of seemingly insurmountable difficulties, including being deaf for a decade and having chronic pain for 15 years (now both cured… as if by magic).

Those three fears – dragons in the Valley of Uncertainty – have made for a terrifying gauntlet to pass through (even now, I’m not yet out the other side).

So yes, whilst I’m appreciative of the gifts that allow me to do the things I do, I’d bet that even with those gifts, doing the things you envy me for has not come more easily to me than doing your Soul Work will for you.

You will have your own gifts and you will have your own gauntlet. I believe your gifts will be no less valuable than mine and that your gauntlet, whilst terrifying, is really no match for your wild soul.

The only question is… are you ready to run your gauntlet?

P.S. If you’re feeling the call to see how I can help you become your magic, follow your next breadcrumb to Waking The Wild Medicine

Art: Matthew Henry, Unsplash

Time to reclaim your magic from the witch wound?

Time to reclaim your magic from the witch wound?

My work with clients entails helping them to reclaim their gold from shadow, and specifically with my ‘Medicine Women’ (one of the most required and most forgotten Feminine archetypes) it’ll entail them expanding beyond the Witch Wound, whose claws have been gripped around their mouths, keeping them nice, quiet, normal and distinctly unmagical, and therefore safely hidden.

Note: you don’t need to identify as a witch (I don’t) for this wound’s shadow to loom large, especially when it comes to you stepping into your Soul Work and being your Medicine.

If, when you speak of allowing yourself to be seen in all your unique magic, you find yourself laughingly using phrases like:

“Eek! I might get burned at the stake!”

“I can imagine being chased out of the village!”

“I feel I could get drowned for saying that!”

That’s our ancient friend the Witch Wound speaking. And those things you’re laughing about are really no joke. You know that fear in your bones, don’t you?

You can thank her, she’s doing her best to remind you of the very real dangers of being seen in all your full glory.

And… the 16th century wants her back.

She’s well intentioned but out of date… what would have once got you into all kinds of hot water, now almost certainly won’t.

You’re :: safe :: here :: now.

…BREATHE, sweet one…

Now try this millennium on for size.

I often talk about looking for just the next breadcrumb on your path. *This* breadcrumb is an invitation to…

Show yourself a little

Speak your truth a little

Let your magic shine a little

And then look out for your next breadcrumb of the guides, helpers and all manner of synchronistic signs that will let you know it’s your time to be your Medicine.

“It may be the first day of your life, the prime of youth or several decades in, when Medicine Woman calls you. Your name on her list. Her new initiate. She crept in whilst you were sleeping, when you over-exerted, when you kissed him, or ate that, or lived there or pushed too hard just one time too many. She crept in and curled up in your cells, your heart, waiting to meet you. Longing to know you. Longing for you to know her, at last.” Lucy H. Pearce.

P.S. If you’re feeling the call to see how I can help you become your magic, follow your next breadcrumb to Waking The Wild Medicine