What the Work Did

I spent years collecting spiritual teachers who wanted me soft and grateful. Yasmine is the first who wanted me whole. The Shadow Feminine circle gave me back a voice I had filed down to keep other people comfortable.

The Beltane Fire retreat broke something open in me that no amount of therapy had touched. Six nights by a fire in the Highlands, eight other women, and a teacher who never once looked away. I came home a different animal.

I booked a Goddess Session as a dare to myself. I left with photographs I cannot stop looking at: not because I look beautiful, but because for the first time I look like me. Yasmine photographs the woman underneath.

The dance work undid a lifetime of holding my breath. I am a 47-year-old woman who had forgotten she had a body. Body as Altar reminded me that motion was the first prayer I ever knew.

The Year & a Day was the hardest, truest thing I have ever done. Twelve moons of being seen with nowhere to hide. I do not recognise the woman who first wrote to her, and I would not trade her back for anything.

I am a sceptic by training and a scientist by trade. I expected incense and platitudes. Instead I got rigour, honesty, and a teacher who treats the old work with the seriousness it deserves. The Demonology circle changed how I read everything.

The Samhain Veil retreat asked me to sit with my grief instead of managing it. By the new moon I had buried what needed burying and walked out lighter than I had been in years. The hardest, sweetest week of my life.