Birthkeepers Retreat
I’ll be supporting my teacher Jane Hardwicke Collings at the ‘Shamanic Womancraft for Birthkeepers’ Retreat on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada, from July 30-August 1, 2017. We are all birthkeepers, if we care about women having choices in birth, if we value birth as sacred, if we hold our birth experiences as soulful rites of passage, […]
From Midwife to Priestess
I wanted to share the story of changing the name of my work from Midwife of the Soul to Priestess Your life, and how this shift arose. A name change, but more than that, the birth of a whole new identity. Seeded in the Void at the end of last year, Midwinter in Canada, when the […]
Underworld Journey
In the very first cycle of the lunar year – the Aries New Moon cycle back in April – my heart took a big hit. Something happened where I felt both deeply disappointed in myself, as well as judged and painfully unsupported. This Aries cycle, with all its forward movement and fire energy, plunged me […]
Four Seasons Journey: Gift 3
{Inspired by Women’s Health Week I wanted to share some of the gifts I’ve received from participating in the Four Seasons Journey – one of the best things I’ve ever done in terms of my health and power as a woman!} The first thing we do in the Four Seasons Journey is make a drum, ancient […]
Medicine Drum workshop
It was a privilege for Sarah and I to facilitate this day with women birthing their own medicine drum! Creating sacred, transformative instruments in a context of loving sisterhood. Here’s a video of some of the lacing work – gentle, repetitive crafting like this changes our brainwaves from beta to alpha, and we are receptive to receiving […]
Imbolc Garden
Happy Imbolc/Candlemas for those in the Southern hemisphere! The traditional date for Imbolc is 1st February in the Northern Hemisphere, so we can translate that to 1st August here in Australia, though it’s debatable whether there’s ever been an Imbolc ‘tradition’ here in the Great South Land (though goddess knows, we have enough sheep!) Astronomically this year, this celebration […]
Rebirthing Ceremony
21.7.2016 I undertook a reclaiming, rebirthing ritual this morning, placing in the ground a rock from a beach of my childhood, some hair and blood, together symbolic of my placenta. I was born around 5km from here, by this river Dandiiri Maiwar (Brisbane River), on Turrbal and Jagera land. I honour these ancestors and guardians, […]
Medicine Drum workshop
Birth Imprint
Here’s a brief story of my birth and an exploration of how this experience has functioned as a primary imprint or template for how I live, create and birth things: I was born in hospital, with an epidural and forceps. My mum felt unmet and unsupported by the midwives on duty and deeply grateful when her obstetrician […]
New School
My daughter is heading to high school this year – a massive shift after choosing to homeschool for the whole of her primary school life! It’s a decision both sudden and not sudden. Sudden in the sense that she raised it on Friday, I rolled with it, my man came along for the ride in […]
Response-ability
The other night my man asked what ‘success’ means to me. His question dovetailed seamlessly with another question I am currently holding: what is genuinely valuable to learn? If school is so much ‘busy-work’ – with kids often so bored cos they know the work they do there is largely meaningless and almost totally disconnected […]
Living Freedom: Elaine Norling
This is an amazing visual history of homebirth in Australia, told through the lens of the lifelong activism efforts of Elaine Norling, consumer advocate and homebirth campaigner since 1969, as presented at the 30th Homebirth Australia conference held in Melbourne earlier this year. A good reminder of where we’ve come from, what we’ve gained, what […]
Birth hormones
Here’s an infographic showing the pathway to flowing with the hormones that help us give birth – awesome! Birth was never meant to take days – primal woman and her baby couldn’t afford for it to take this long, predators would sniff them out and they’d be dead. Giving birth is a strong, simple imprint […]
Wombat Medicine
On the weekend I came across a wombat that had been hit by a car, sadly common around here. But this was a mama wombat, and her baby was also dead. Its tiny, pale, beautiful body was tucked under one of her front legs – perhaps the work of someone who’d found them earlier. The […]