A BODY OF WISDOM

I was not sure if I should write about this. It's a resurgence that is quite personal and unique to me. But as something that I have taken the last few hours to decompress, looping around different subjects and tangents, I have come to realise that the nature of what I am about to share is to do with nature, with cycles, with death and rebirth. And as I write this on the cusp of the Full Moon x Lunar Eclipse (despite all the saturation around these events online, I remain a Moon Mother Practitioner, devoted mostly to her guidance within the phases), I realise now that it makes sense that this subject would have come up. There have been a lot of tears shed up to this point in thinking about this but these are the words that have flowed and the wheels that have turned within me.

The driving force behind this piece is guilt, more specifically, mother's guilt from loss and desperation. Desperation to be alone and also long to be with what was lost. Yesterday, as I was gardening and deadheading the different flowers in the garden so that new flowers could bloom, I kept thinking about why I could not be seen for who I was even though all of the facts stacked up, even if, from an unbiased, outside perspective, I could share a list that details where I was to where I am now. As I have mentioned many times within this community, everything I have achieved has been done on my own, and I am the only one in my family who has done that. Everyone else had parents to help support them, buy apartments or first cars for them, or allow them to move in with their partners so that they could save for x, y, z. It sounds superficial even to say that (see, guilt has a way of slapping me in the face), but nonetheless, it is a fact.

I did not have that same support. I had to do everything on my own. But I still, to this day, have yet to get recognition for any of it. People within my family still cannot see me for who I am. I am seen, in many ways, in a completely opposite light based mostly on my mother's decades of gaslighting and lies. And I sometimes catch myself, on days like today, wondering how any average thought-provoking person could not see the facts and acknowledge what I have made of myself by myself, regardless of what anyone has said.

Truthfully, and rather annoyingly, whenever this thought reemerges, I am caught by surprise. In frustration or anguish, I ask myself why this subject I know I have worked through, resolved, and moved on from still comes up. Why is it that when I have found resolution with what was and what love what is now, there still lingers a visceral feeling of pain and profound loss that returns, unannounced, unexpected…

What I will add, however, is that when this thought does come up, it's not necessarily as a concrete memory that has opened the wound and caused the emotions to come back, but rather a remembering from my body.

Over the past few days, I have felt a gut-wrenching need to return to our old land in the Byron Bay Hinterland. After the loss of my third child, I performed a ritual where I planted what remained from this loss under a bright Peach Bougainvillea. It came into full bloom when we sold our property at her peak. Her blooms linger in my mind as I bleed on my moon cycle in this moment and this desire to sit under her, how big she much be now, her branches and thorns to encapsulate me with her sharp embrace... Without former recourse or prompting of this ritual, I feel a strong pull to go back there, to sit on the land by that specific beautiful plant and hear the chants I once called out to the Moon. And I can tell you now, with greater clarity, that this desire was prompted by grief.

Grief isn't an emotion that we have to necessarily be experiencing in the moment from an immediate personal occurrence. In fact, when we witness someone else experiencing grief, it finds its thread back to us and connects with the deep sadness and loss that we have all experienced in some way, shape, or form. Prompted in this way, it enables us to connect with other people's emotions and feel their feelings, as we are all connected in this way. Although the experiences are personal, the emotion and the sentiment are universally understood.

This grief that I was experiencing in these last few weeks came from not being loved by those who brought me into this world and was mingled with guilt and overwhelmed by my selfishness because I have a husband and three children with me today when so many have far less. The duality of grief and guilt was tugging and pulling me at both ends.

So how does one go from feeling on top of the world to feeling raw and stripped bare, burst open from the seams, wanting to be embraced in love and held in love while at the same time wanting to be angry and alone and wanting to be screaming, deep primordial screams?

I've never actually sat down to write about all the grief and loss in my life. There is a lot to bring myself into a place of remembering at one concentrated moment. I fear I could not bring myself out of bed or out of the house for some days if I did. Their looming presence at being summoned would be too much company to allow the outside world in. So most times, I allow myself to sit with one, two, or three at a time and love myself a little deeper through them because all those pains are buried so deep that they are often too difficult to see on the surface.

As I move through different phases of this life, feeling like this body is changing from the uninhibited ease of speed of youth toward a much slower pace, I find myself longing more for those experiences and wisdom deeply rooted in the Earth. I care less for philosophies and ideals and concepts created to follow a planet, a sign, a birth chart, or any chart for that matter and care more for what my body is feeling and what it has chosen to remember on this day.

Our minds may have decompressed from an experience, and our emotional body may have moved through it, but the body will always know. The body will always remember how it shuddered, shook, and froze in the most unlikely of times. The body holds wisdom, it is the gateway to our freedom. The body is what allows us to remember, to remember our time, not as linear or permanent, but one that is meant to be cherished even in the dark nights of the soul. I allow myself to look in the mirror and see beyond the stress that stares back at me in the ageing ways that they are appearing day by day and, instead, see the wisdom behind each new fold and crevice, each new greying hair, each new discovered place of softness that once was toned and firm.

And so, from this perspective and knowledge, I allow myself to feel the aching in my body, the pounding in my chest. Some say the body remembers from lifetimes ago, and some say the body is what guides our instincts, and in the words of Bessel van der Kolk, the body keeps the score.

To my body that flutters and cries and feels the anguish beared by others, that enables me to experience touch and sight, and sound and taste, I will love you, I will care for you. I will tend to you as the wisdom keeper you are and keep you forever rooted in the natural world that these cells and nutrients arose and will return.

It is from the Earth that we come, it is to the Earth in which we will eventually return. So allow us to spend our days of this Earth. If when our heart is no longer beating, our essence returns to something else: the stars, the Earth, to wherever your beliefs may lie, then why do we not allow our body to be the sanctuary that it is while life still runs through it? These are the thoughts I ponder as I know now that my body guided this memory that prompted these tugging feelings.

Why does death have to be a place of remembrance and sanctuary rather than life? I choose to walk this life, however long it may be, regarding my body as the sanctuary that it is. To tread on the Earth's floor with my bare feet, hearing every sound that emanates, might I choose to be a living sanctuary each day, no matter what may be at play. To love and to honour the wisdom, to see it grow and expand with the expansion of my hips. I choose each New Moon to go into the darkest parts of my being and feel rage at what has been and stand up naked, awoken and refined, emerging more deeply rooted in its wisdom. For isn't the body, like the tides of the Earth, then pulled by the Moon each month to a point of swelling so much that the emotions bubbling to the surface cannot help but burst from my eyes and crack my heart wide open? This intrinsic entangling of myself with the magick that runs through my veins is the way I choose to live life. To live life through this body, not of the body but through this body.

And you can throw the words: witch, hag, crone, new age woo woo, pseudo-spiritualist or whatever you like toward it, because in the end, this is simply a return to the ancient ways, to what matters most. Because self-preservation is not something to do with vanity and anti-ageing. Self-preservation is a way to honour you as a living sanctuary that you are. And this is why the rituals, the products and the things that I create and use do not focus on ageing or cellulite or lumps and bumps. They focus on honouring the inner temple that you are as this sanctuary, living life, honouring the wisdom of the body, the wisdom that comes through the body.

Think for a moment about why singing and dancing feel so good. How sound and music transport us to different feelings and experiences in an instant. It is because the body knows. It's the wisdom keeper.

"We are the women. We've come to drum. We are the channel between the Earth and the Sun. We hold the wisdom of the ancient ways. We will bring peace to these troubled days".

And it's kind of the point of why we would gather in Circle. We would come to someone's fire, someone's hearth, and we would come with whatever it is we would have to bring, and we would weave our spells through words of interconnectedness to empower and allow the resonance of the wisdom that each woman would hold to come together to create this one universal force.

We often focus on the end of life as being this checklist of doing all the things we said we wanted to do, and having no regrets. I climbed the mountain, and the view was spectacular, it was great! We focus on these final achievements rather than regarding the day as grand. Every setting sun is a grand finale, a final achievement, the rising sun too is an achievement in itself, a blessing. And when we live each day with the remembrance one would hold of taking their last breath, we are living life around the hearth of magick itself. We are in the centre of the cycles, we are in the centre of the seasons, we are in the centre of the elements, and we become one with all that is living and all that has ever lived. We are one with all.

Wisdom goes where reverence flows. Let us have wisdom for the body and what it is telling us. Let it allow us to explore our depths with care and respect. Let us honour ourselves as living sanctuaries, for everything worth knowing lies within.

Amoureuse,​​​​​​​​

Brooke x​​​​​​​