Bringing the light in

(Re-)discovering that we live in a world of endless possibility and magic

What an intense week in London this has been! A long-awaited family visit from afar, the opening of sacred space that illuminates our depths and raises the frequency of the field that weaves itself among us, meeting my creative partner and new close friend in person for the first time, and shocked that a long-loved spot for contemplation on a beautiful hillside has been ravaged in the name of forestry management.

This morning I sat among the hustle and bustle of an airport feeling into all the sensations and events of these last few days. My heart has been truly opened and set on fire by the energy of the sacred space my intuition has guided me into. It was timely and much-needed for the family get-together when like so many, every interaction and conversation is loaded with baggage that is hardly known and even less understood. Coming into physical presence with my recent creative partner feels as natural and as easy as seeing an old friend whom I have known for many years, thanks in part at least to the container we have been carefully curating for the last eight months or so.

I then took Josselin out to a favourite walk at the edge of the Chilterns after a very chilly night in a cottage we had rented for our meeting. It was a crisp clear morning, sunny and still. The trees in the copse near where we parked were unusually quiet, even for this time of year. We looked for a circle of yew trees which hide an ancient hawthorn from outside view. Once you enter the circle, the energy of generations of practice and worship are palpable to the sensitive among us. I wasn’t sure exactly where they were and in fact, we entered a space that had been partly dug up and it felt all wrong. I was unsettled by this, hoping that we had not yet come to the yews.

We continued along the top of the hill and were blessed with the circle of trees I had been looking for. We quietly entered the space and sensed into what we could feel there. I gently laid my hand on the hawthorn and asked for guidance on something unfolding in my life that can easily knock me off balance. I felt the depth of the tree’s roots and the centuries of devotion that it has received. Through my touch came the simple advice to be as rooted as the hawthorn, open to the sky and elements and whatever happens around it, flowering when the conditions are right, letting leaves gently fall to the ground when it is time.

Then we walked to the edge of a bluff that on a good day offers views as far as Winchester, Oxford and Milton Keynes. I used to rent a small property in this area when I was working regularly in the UK. I made a strong connection with the local landscape that has hosted human community for millennia and gives me a felt sense of archaic life. I often came to walk on this hill and rest awhile on a stone bench that sat below three beautiful, fairly young silver birches. This has been a spot where I have come to laugh, cry, ponder, assimilate, let go, integrate and begin anew, for years.

As we came over the edge of the bluff, I knew something was different. Our earlier forage into a circle that wasn’t had already been a sign that changes were afoot on the hill. But I would never have anticipated that forestry management of the hill included tearing out these beautiful birches. It felt energetically bewildering and then of course, the mind looks for explanations. I brought my attention back into my body and together, Josse and I stood in the places where the birches had once been. There were a few roots here and there but in essence, they had disappeared.

I half-expected to feel bereft because this spot had helped me through an important and challenging time of my life. Instead I felt calm and centred, filled with the deep knowing that a cycle and season had come to an end. In times gone by I would have felt distressed or worse, but that morning, I had only a sense of completion, that my energy is now free to root and entangle itself elsewhere. I have intuited in recent months that my presence there was liberating itself and inviting me into a new experience of life and love.

Photo credit: Asha Singh 2024

Which brings me to the present and the unfolding of new sacred space and relationships that began this week. When I shared this account yesterday with another good friend who had come with me to the yew circle and hawthorn, the bench and the birches some months ago, she told me that she had thought of them all the previous day while out on her bicycle. Intuition, synchronicity and resonance are part of everyday life and powerful energies at our disposal if we learn to pay attention to and trust them.

So as I sat in my slightly frazzled state this morning in the airport, I wondered to myself yet again why so few of us are genuinely interested in illumination, or the expansion of consciousness. Woke definitely isn’t awake and by the expansion of consciousness, I mean experiencing that life is all about energy, the frequency of which determines our health, abundance and prosperity. We are taught - and indeed conditioned - from before we can speak that life is limited, we must think and behave in certain ways to belong and be loved, and that we need to compete and hoard in order to flourish, because the world is unfair, dangerous and full of struggle.

But what if life isn’t actually like that at all?

What if we are in fact the creators of our own life, enabled and supported by the generating - organising - destroying forces of the universe?

And what if Life really does create the conditions that are conducive to life?

On a planet where our collective future is increasingly threatened by the entangled, escalating, existential risks that our fragmented view and understanding of life have inadvertently created, I also wonder at length why leaders in all sorts of positions of formal responsibility and guidance rarely develop the kind of clear seeing that would enable them to address many of those risks effectively. Quantum physicists have known about energy and matter for more than a century but the knowledge of reality and how it works remain something mysterious to be contemplated by people dressed in strange robes who cut themselves off from modern society for decades. Or a fun time to be had in our spare time with the help of psychedelics.

My decades of lived experience in leadership and organisational development point me towards quite the opposite. Using our minds or even our tech to solve our problems just creates plenty of others. I know numbers of people who work in corporate or other organisational environments who have their own spiritual beliefs and practices. But their everyday human life is largely separate, somewhere where they need to show up in ways that get them recognised and rewarded. The stance is understandable but I question deeply how useful, productive or empowering it can ever be. Chances are we’ll keep on creating the same old challenges again and again. In fact, most organisations are highly extractive and unconscious. Programming AI from that worldview, those values and behaviours is just a recipe for disaster.

“What is now proved was once only imagined.”

William Blake

Real change can only begin when we change our frequency.

The powerful energetic jolt I received last weekend surprised, delighted and excited me, profoundly. Then I pulled back in the opposite direction, just like a rubber band that has been stretched too far too quickly. I never was much good at improvised catapults, the band often sprung back on my fingers and it generally hurt. Sudden, expansive insights when we bring the light in also require discernment before we act. The light helps us see our deeper patterns - the ones that keep us safe, loved and belonging. These patterns are unconscious and develop before we have language to describe our first experiences of the world.

One of the great gifts of illuminating our dark corners is that those patterns can start to surface and be healed. I realised this week that massive change is ahead of me, in pretty much every area of my life. The inevitable emotional storm began but I know now to come back into my body and be as present as I can. I am feeling far more empathy with the world around me following this experience - something unknown to me is healing all by itself. My thinking has definitely been turned upside down and inside out, and it’s just the start of a year-long initiation that I committed to intuitively and spontaneously earlier this week. I don’t know how I will pay for it, I’m just trusting that the healing will help me to share my abundance and for financial prosperity to flow in the circles I am creating once more.

Discernment has always been a challenge for one who can throw caution to the winds when her heart is set on fire. But thankfully I am wiser now through cathartic experiences and sustained reflection-in-action. I can be both grounded and open to what is unfolding within and around me, and gently, lovingly, clearly take the next good steps towards the life that is mine to live.

It’s a magical, astonishing universe that we live in, when we are open to seeing how it actually really works.

Restabilize is a body of practice for developing our capability for reflection-in-action so that we can better navigate the paradox and polarity we increasingly encounter today. Whether that is in our formal positions of responsibility, our families or society at large, Josselin and I are very happy to offer you:

• self-paced digital learning in an online adventure called MEET, where you will explore fundamental practices for becoming more stable that you can use straight away in your own life

• guided one-one or collective support to discover those practices together

You will be able to enrol for these from the beginning of March.

We will also be holding regular online events to look at why it is so useful to become more stable and how. You can already sign up here to join us when we start. There is a short introductory video and a downloadable pdf too if you would like to find out more first.

Thanks for reading…and we look forward to meeting you somewhere along the way!