“When did your awakening begin?”

I was 27. I knew my foundation was crumbling in that first full year of university. Arriving on campus I felt weird; like I was entering some shadow world I was unfamiliar with. During the last class on my first day, I felt this strange dire energy come over me. I scribbled “A storm is coming” in my notebook and I knew I was entering a heavy stage in my life. So much happened that year. I broke up with the boy I thought I would marry and my youthful optimism about love went with him. I also started deconstructing my Christian faith and as those towers crumbled I found myself, like Medea, asking “How do you soothe utter desolation? How do you…stand among the ruins of your home?”

That was the beginning.

Fast forward two years later. I’m pregnant, walking out of that same university, from the same classroom. It’s dark and the leaves are falling, my car a parking lot away. For a brief moment, I feel a chill of fear run through me; I, a small vulnerable female with-child, alone at night in the darkness. But the fear was overshadowed quickly by a powerful knowing that rumbled up from my core; I need not be afraid of anything in the darkness. I am the thing that should be feared in the dark. It was primal, almost animalistic, this knowing. It came from someplace inside me that I had never tapped into before. It was the powerful spark of life inside me – and also the powerful force of death.

That was the beginning.

Fast forward another four years. My heart is broken, and so much trust is lost. I realize the safe world I’ve built isn’t so safe. Yes, I’ve grown in ways but I’m still people-pleasing, still catering to a masculine ideology that scrapes at the raw skin of the feminine, still voiceless, and I’m so over it. I’m an exhausted mother, a disillusioned lover; a woman who is tired of shrinking, tired of being the one who is always understanding, always empathic, always calm, always patient, minimizing her own needs because someone else might need something too, playing small in order to fit into someone else’s definition of womanhood. And I’m just, fucking, over it.

That was the beginning.

Fast forward another two years. I’m a budding photographer exploring creativity in a more profound way. I decide to read “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. She asks me to make a list of forbidden desires (or something along those lines). She then challenges me to explore one of them. What happens if you engage in this thing? I only remember two things on my list:

1. reading/ watching horror stories
2. paganism and folklore – pre-Christian belief and mythology

For me, creativity is a sacred space and so I picked myth and started unraveling. I read some books. I tried some things. But most importantly, I started talking to nature and remembering rituals long buried in my bones.

That was the beginning.

Fast forward another year. I’m sitting at this desk trying to pinpoint the beginning of my feminine awakening – the moment I started the process of unearthing. But it wasn’t just one big moment, it was a series of small ones; shards of colored glass to create a mosaic.

I keep trying to find the words to define what this is. But there is no definition in my bones, only memories; communing with the elements, how they shared their gifts, and how I owe them mine.

As my body opens and I tap into the innate wisdom it has always possessed, I find myself humbled, more and more by the simplicity of happiness; and the power of quiet. The truth is not that different from the Matrix, once you see it you can’t unsee it. We don’t have to buy into a system that says we have to strive daily, we don’t have to play small, we don’t have to betray ourselves in order to have love, we don’t have to harden, and we don’t have to deny what feels true to us just because some institution tells us it’s wrong.

We have intuition for a reason. Our bodies house wisdom, but we need to be willing to block out the screaming of the world and sit quietly with our own souls. And you can trust it; you can trust your intuition. You can trust your heart. You can trust your body. You don’t need a guru, you don’t need a teacher (although both are wonderful and serve a purpose, you don’t need any external validation for your truth). Take what resonates like lightning in your bones and throw out what doesn’t sit right in your gut.

Even if your family is afraid of it.

Even if your partner doesn’t like it.

Even if you lose friends.

If something is for you, you won’t miss it, not if you are walking in alignment with your soul.

And this is just the beginning.