The ancient wisdom of rewilding

I don’t know about you but some days when I pause I notice that the list of things I need to do and be just to keep a modicum of sanity and a positive mindset seems to have gotten very very long. There’s my yoga, my breath work, eating well, making sure I get out in nature, my daily chat with the universe, my gratitude practice, journaling, making sure I get enough sleep…..the list really could go on and on and on……

And if you happen to be a woman (like me), who is a recovering perfectionist, or perhaps you’re a learned people pleaser, or you grew up having to compete for attention, you might feel like not doing ‘all the things’ every day is going to leave you disappointed in yourself and with life - not giving it your very best somehow.

This is why I continuously come back to the ancient wisdom of India’s 5,000 year old science, Ayurveda. Its central tenet, its foundational belief is that you don’t need to be fixed. Ayurveda reminds me that there is no perfect version of myself I’m striving to be, nor is there a perfect morning routine. Instead Ayurveda teaches me that by always being the truest version of me, I will find balance, abundant health and lasting happiness. And I can tell you when I start having a long list and lots of guilt about all the things I ‘need to do to be me’, well that’s the most unlike me I can be. Ayurveda is my guide to being a rewilded woman, to embracing my natural tendencies and strengths.

Ayurveda has taught me how to use easily accessible things like food, yoga, my breath and my routines to feel more like me. This Eastern science is based on the concept that we are all made up of a beautiful and unique combination of five natural elements - earth, water, fire, air and space. As long as I know which ones I have more of and which I have less of, I can make tiny adjustments in my day to day life to keep feeling more like myself each moment. It’s one lens by which we can get to know ourselves and even the smallest amount of Ayurveda knowledge gives us immediate power to return to the truest version of who we are.

I’m not one to gate keep wisdom that’ll help you rebecome you so here’s my top three favourite Ayurveda nuggets to get you started.

Start where you are - if you don’t like how you feel today then you can change exactly that. But rather than working on changing your mood, take the action that will change your mood. This could be anything from eating nourishing food, to putting down your phone, to going for a walk, to getting more sleep. You know deep inside what action will make you feel good so go do that and then watch yourself feel more like you.

Like increases like, opposites create balance - in Ayurveda not being in balance, not being ourselves is created when we have too much of something and not enough of another. But human nature is to give ourselves more of what we have. If you can tune into what you have too much of, (busy-ness, work, travel, appointments), and give yourself the opposite of that (rest, stillness, connection, nourishment), then in Ayurveda you will experience more balance. It can be a lot more complex in this ancient science but think of this as a great starting point to practice and play with.

Routine is your spiritual container - in Ayurveda we use the Sanskrit word dinacharya to describe your daily activities and it’s said to begin the night before. How you finish the day (feeling like yourself or someone else), is even more important than how you begin it because it impacts on your ability to receive rest which is one of the three pillars of Ayurveda. Create an evening and morning routine that is simple, supportive and helps you remember who you are and makes you feel like yourself - something that you can easily put on repeat every single day. Anything from a gratitude practice, to a moment just for you and your coffee, to journaling or gym - it’s whatever simple acts help you end the day well and set you up each morning to go be your fabulous self.

Think of Ayurveda as innate wisdom from the natural world on how to be yourself. For me it’s one of four bodies of knowledge I use to rewild on the day to day and to support women I work with to rewild and feel both comfortable and unapologetic being themselves. Keep reading The Rewilded Woman and its last three upcoming installments to learn more about the easy tools you can use to keep rewilding and enjoy being you.

Redefining fiercely, feminine action

One of the greatest disservices to our innate feminine nature is the widely held view that certain ways of being, certain traits, certain actions are either masculine or feminine. This is essentially a patriarchal license to label women as the ‘weaker sex’, a phrase that gives permission to men to take advantage of and abuse women in a myriad of ways. Women experiencing perimenopause? Labelled as female hysteria by the male medical profession and resulted in thousands of women being sent to psychiatric units for the rest of their lives. Women as victims and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence? Still today the statistics tell us how many women were raped not how many men are rapists. The characterization of men as ‘breadwinners’ continues to perpetuate economic hardship for millions of women, and is why women globally earn an average of 30 per cent less than men even when they are employed in the same job.

Dear one, you hold a myriad of qualities and characteristics within your innately feminine being and you can label them however you want or not at all. Part of the process of rewilding ourselves as women is to become aware of what belongs to us and what doesn’t (see The Rewilded Woman story #1), and reclaim what oppressive systems and forced learning have denied us.

Earlier this week in The Rewilded Woman I explored the role that embodying our truest selves plays in helping us live unapologetically in our day to day lives. Part of practicing being the most rewilded version of you is also about taking action - yes action - a word that is often viewed as a falsely labelled ‘masculine’, a word associated with ‘male’ characteristics such as assertiveness, conquering, determination, strength, power, stamina, achievement, performance, initiative - you get the idea.

So today I give you “The Rewilded Woman Permission Slip” to take whatever kind of action feels like it’s all you, and to reclaim any action that you’ve shied away from due to its masculine labelling.

All those times you’ve been quiet, or held your words in so as ‘not to make a fuss’ and then felt like you’d silenced yourself. Your action is your voice, make it clear and loud and unapologetically you.

All those times you said yes to staying late or to tasks not in your job description or to organizing Secret Santa when you hate Christmas. Your action is using the word ‘no’, with no explanation and no apology - because as we are beginning to relearn - no is a complete sentence.

All those times you are the one doing EVERYTHING, the school lunches, the family calendar, the dog walks, the friends’ dinners, the cleaning, the holiday research, the bill paying. Your action is delegating and receiving support. If this resonates with you, trying say ‘no’ as an added bonus 😀

Thinking our way into being unapologetically ourselves only goes so far. In fact if our actions don’t align with our desires then I believe that’s an important sign we are living out of alignment, out of our integrity. It’s why saying yes when we mean no, has us feeling disappointed in ourselves and pressured by the world.

What action do you not take because you fear being seen as unfeminine? And what ways do you stop being yourself because you’ve been trained and / or socialized to believe that this would be too masculine? Take a deep dive into the seven feminine archetypes - the Huntress, the Queen, the Maiden and more - and reclaim action as your divine feminine right. Reclaim power, strength, freedom, anger, outrage, leadership, assertiveness, intelligence, decisiveness and more as part of your innately feminist soul. Let your actions match your clarity, let your actions bring your values to life, let action be the embodiment of your most rewilded, unapologetic self. That’s the YOU the world needs more of. I’ll see you soon for more of The Rewilded Woman and to make sure your December has you feeling powerful, alive and fiercely feminine.

Embodying your unapologetic self

You may have heard the word ‘embodied’ in a yoga class, or a coaching session or as you scroll through your socials where every unqualified person wants to remind us that if only we could embody abundance we’d all be rich - sorry not sorry but that does drive me a little bit batty!

The neuroscience behind the word, the idea of embodiment is this. The more of our senses we use to connect with our clarity, our values, our dharma, and with the essence of who we are, the more opportunity the different parts of our brain have to focus on. The simplest example is one I have to remind myself of every single week. I am not a runner unless I actually run. If I only use my thoughts inside my mind for running, I’ll never actually run anywhere. So I have to use my other senses. I use language and my voice to tell my friends what races I’ve signed up to. I get my running gear out and put it on the bed and look at it for a while. Eventually I put it on and lace up my shoes. Some days I even go out and use my body to actually run - which admittedly feels really good. I read about running, about training, about what to eat for long runs. I post a photo on socials that I went running. And all of a sudden I’m no longer someone who thinks about running, I’m a real life runner.

The latest one I’m playing with - because it is playful and life and the way we live it is a game - is ‘I’m building a global, nature-based empire to uplift women’. These words help me stop playing small and to start making decisions that feel more expansive, more connected to Mother Nature and more ‘all in’ for women everywhere. This kind of narrative gave me the courage to bring on admin support - because if I’m leading a global empire I can’t be the one doing all the admin all the time right? Me embodying building an empire to uplift women helps me say no to events and teaching requests that are not exclusively for women, or that don’t align with my values of integrity and connection.

So whoever the YOUest version of you is go embody her today. Sometimes we have to start small, pick one thing that feels like embodying the truest version of ourselves. If your soul is craving art and you work in a mansplaining office with no windows, maybe today’s embodiment is stopping at a free gallery after work, or doodling on your notepad through every boring meeting or buying a print from your favourite artist or walking through the park on the way home to notice the artistry of Mother Nature. The thing we so often forget, because we are fed the lie that change only happens with dramatic events, is that it only takes us turning up for ourselves over and over again, it only takes us consistently creating a series of small actions and feelings that align with who we really are, to become that version of ourselves on the day to day. I only have to run once a week to be a runner. The most wonderful thing about this approach is that it comes with an incredible snowball effect. And that effect is our brain’s Default Network Mode (yep that’s right, we talked about that earlier in The Rewilded Woman), reprogramming itself to look for more of what we are feeding it. So every tiny action and thought you have that feels like you being unapologetically you, is putting you back on the path to re-become yourself. Isn’t it wild?!

So embody the YOUest version of you today, do it again tomorrow, and the next day and then watch how life suddenly begins to feel like it’s supporting you to be more like yourself. Some call it a miracle, I call it science, either way you’ll be playing the game of life on your own terms.

I love you, thank you so much for being here and I’ll see you very soon for more of The Rewilded Woman.

Why are you here?

Today, in The Rewilded Woman we finally get around to purpose. Personally I think there is waaaaaay too much importance placed on all the things we have to do to ‘know our why’ and ‘find our purpose’. In our most primal human form the reason we are here is to exist, to be.

The Industrial Revolution that began in the late 1700’s shifted many societies from agrarian to manufacturing, significantly impacted population movement to urban centres in pursuit of the better wages offered over what could be earned with subsistence farming, catapulted the rise of capitalism and began the systematic scourging of the planet for coal, iron and other natural resources - which in turn created vast pollution.

How, you might be wondering, does the Industrial Revolution have anything to do with finding your purpose? Because these two centuries in history are responsible for completely reframing the value of our existence. With the Industrial Revolution, the value of humans and the planet started being calculated by how much could be manufactured and produced from us and by us. And so ended our wild days of living off the land, of being in rhythm with Mother Nature, of valuing rest, human and nature connection as part of daily life.

To embrace our innate knowledge that we hold intrinsic value just by the very fact that we are alive, requires us to let go of the notion that value is defined by production. Even more so as women whose ‘production’ in the home and family has historically been calculated at zero, and focused for centuries, on how many children we have birthed and the gender of said children (depending on which culture we grew up in).

So please start with this baseline - you are deeply valued, loved and needed in this world with or without a ‘purpose’. In The Rewilded Woman stories three and four, I delved into knowing ourselves and getting clarity on our values. I love this phrase, ‘purpose reveals itself when identity is clear’ because it takes the seeking and the doing out of finding our purpose. By learning to be completely ourselves, we easily define why we are here and what we are making of our lives. I much prefer the yoga version of purpose, defined as our divine destiny and our individual path in life. If you looked back on your life, what would make you feel proudest and most satisfied with the life you have lived? Only you can answer that question and when you do, that’s your dharma, it’s the reason you get up every morning filled with joy and energy to go live your truth and do all the things that light you up and feed your soul. And that is so much bigger than a why or a purpose because it’s you sharing the very essence of who you are with the world - and that is pure magic.

Go be you always goddess and I’ll see you soon for more of The Rewilded Woman.