Midlife Evolution

Happy St. Patrick’s Day ☘️

Since the world is collectively tipping its hat to Celtic culture today, it seems like the right moment to say a bit about the retreat I’m offering this spring.

Reclaiming Your Sovereign Self
A women’s retreat rooted in the Great Mothers of Celtic myth
You might be wondering why I’m suddenly talking about Celtic goddesses… and what that has to do with your life.

I’ve been asking myself the same question for the past year and a half.
What I can say right now is this:

This work is needed in the world we’re living in.

Not just personally.
But collectively.

Personally I’ve come to experience it as a kind of detox.

A slow unwinding of what it has meant to live as a woman in a world shaped for millennia by patriarchal structures.

So that something more whole can begin to take root.

But the “how”... it’s honestly hard to explain…

This weekend I was trying to find the words for what has shifted in me through this work.

The best I could come up with was:

magic.

Not in a sparkly way.

But in the sense that something reorganizes at a level the mind can’t quite track.

Something I experience as both energetic and cellular.

This work seems to call to women who are already doing the inner work.

Women who have insight, awareness, language…
and yet still sense that something essential hasn’t fully shifted.

Women who feel deeply, who care about the world, and are tired of carrying it in ways that leave them depleted.

Women who know, somewhere in themselves, that there is another way to inhabit their lives.

This is the work we’ll be stepping into together at a small retreat this spring.

It’s not for everyone.

But for the women who feel the pull of it, it can be profoundly transformative.

If you’re curious, you can learn more here: https://www.midlife-evolution.com/spring-womens-retreat

Took this photo in my backyard one day, when I was struck by that spectacular yellow against the blue sky.

Then I caught myself going down a rabbit hole about the ugly poles and wires “ruining the view”, which spiraled into annoyance about all the downsides of living in the city.

Allowing the negativity of my mind to take over erased the beauty I was seeing and changed the felt sense in my body from one of gratitude to irritation.

Noticing this I shifted my perspective and focused on the tree and the sky, accepting the poles and the wires, allowing them to just be. With that they faded into the background of my attention, rather than the foreground.

Ahh. There was peace and gratitude again.

I think this is a metaphor for how to navigate the coming days. So much fear and anger over the election. Heartache and overwhelm of the ever-expanding humanitarian crises in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti—the list and the horror feels endless.

So it is crucial that those of us who can be are intentional about where we put our focus.

Can you shift your focus from the ugly parts and instead choose to contribute to the kind of feelings you want more of in the world?

Can you find things to celebrate?

Can you find hope?

Trust?

Even love?

Where can you put a little kindness or gratitude out into the field?

And if you can’t quite get there, can you at least inhabit a neutral space?

This is a way to make a difference no matter what else is going on, no matter what time, energy or resources you have to contribute. I yourself and in the world.

To be clear, I don’t mean that you ignore your emotions.

Feel them. Literally.

Where do they show up in your body? Breathe and stay with them a bit, allowing them to move through by focusing on the felt sense.

Notice when your mind wants to keep ramping them up and come back to the felt sense.

Maybe even find some way to move them out, like movement or some kind of creative process.

And then come back and choose to focus on something with a higher vibration.

We are evolving, the old systems and old paradigms falling away. But entrenched patterns and power don’t easily give up their place.

That’s what we’re in the midst of; that’s the bigger picture.

It’s up to each of us right now to be a “point of light” and provide a counterpoint to all the darkness and negativity, and I believe that as mature women we are especially adept at this. We have the wisdom, the life experience and the fortitude to wrangle our wonderful minds and put them to work for us, rather than being led around by our triggered emotions.

This is just another example of what it means to Age Fiercely.