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Over the last few weeks, I have been getting one question more than any other from the women writing to me.

What do I do with the rage?

How do I transmute it? How do I use it without it spilling out into my relationships? How do I hold it without repressing it and having it damage me from the inside? How do I not turn into the woman I do not want to be, either the one who burns everything around her or the one who quietly disappears into illness and exhaustion?

These are powerful questions. They are the questions a woman asks when she has already done some of the work and knows there is more. They are the questions of women who have read Hysterical and The Boys We Are Losing, felt the rage rise, and arrived at the next layer.

Now what.

This piece is my attempt at an answer.

I want to name that the teaching that follows is not philosophy. I have spent three decades working with rage in my own body and in other women’s bodies. Through nervous system regulation. Through somatic psychotherapy. Through the mystery school work I have been holding for years, where we sit in circle and the women find their way into the power of their own rage and through to the other side of it. This is the work I have been doing in devotion for so long that it is now time to bring some of it into the open.

Let me begin where I should always begin, which is in my own body.

A moment of my own

A long time ago, a man I loved and was married to betrayed me. The details do not matter, and they are mine. What matters is what happened in my body.

The righteousness came first. Then, almost immediately, the rage widened — to him, to every man who had ever done this, to five thousand years of women being lied to. I could feel it pouring through. And underneath it, I felt my heart close. A small click. A door shutting.

What came next I am still reckoning with. The castrating queen who had lived in my body since girlhood came online without my permission and began, day after day, to murder the relationship from the other side. He had broken the trust. That was true. But it is also true that I made sure the relationship died. I did it with small precise cruelties I told myself were honesty. I was tortured by it. I wanted to forgive. I wanted to open. Some part of me could not. The rage had me. I did not have it.

I tell you this not because it is unusual. I tell you because it is ordinary. It is what happens in our intimate relationships, our public lives, our scrolling, our rage at the news cycle. The rage starts as a sacred signal and somewhere along the way becomes something else — something that runs us instead of moving through us.

The trap looks, from the inside, exactly like the cause we are fighting for.

This is what the women writing to me are sensing. They can feel the rage is real. They can feel it is sacred in some way. And they can also feel it pulling toward either spilling out onto the wrong people or folding inward and causing damage. They are trying to find the third path.

That is the path this piece is trying to name.

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A word before I begin

I am writing in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside are polarity cosmologies. These are a few traditions among many. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.

Sacred rage

Let me start with what rage is when it is doing its actual work.

Rage is intelligence. It is the body’s recognition that a line has been crossed. A line in your own life, or a line in the world, or both at once. Rage rises when something that should not be happening is happening. It is the nervous system’s most accurate signal that the situation in front of you is not okay.

Rage is also power. It is animating. It pulls energy up from the belly and into the chest, the throat, the limbs. It is what mothers feel when their child is threatened. It is what women feel when they finally stop accommodating. It is what whole movements feel when generations of swallowed no finally arrive in the throat as no more.

This rage is sacred. It is medicine. It is what wakes us up. It is what turns a slumbering culture into a moving one. Every meaningful change in human history has been propelled, at least in part, by women’s rage finally finding its target.

I will defend this rage with my life.

And.

Rage was not designed to be a permanent home.

Rage was designed to move through the body, propel an action, and then release. Like a wave. Like a contraction in labour. It rises, it crests, it does its work, it passes, and the body returns to baseline, available for the next signal.

This is what sacred rage looks like in the body. Hot. Clean. Located. It knows what it is about, who it is addressed to, what it is asking for. Time-limited. It rises, it acts, it releases. A woman in sacred rage is dangerous to the structures that should be afraid of her, and she is also available — to her body, to her loves, to her work, to her own life.

The rage has not eaten her. It has used her, briefly and precisely, and released her.

This is the rage your body is capable of. Some of you have it already. Some of you have had it and lost it. The capacity is in your body. It is not lost. It is waiting for the conditions that let it move.

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Where the rage actually goes

The rage is not the problem. The rage having nowhere to go is the problem.

Here is what the women writing to me are sensing, and what they are right to sense.

Rage that does not move does not disappear. It goes somewhere. It either spills outward in directions you would not choose, or it folds inward and goes underground and corrodes the host.

When rage spills outward in the wrong direction, it ends up on the people closest to us. The husband who is not the man we are actually angry at. The friend who said the wrong thing. The mother. The sister. The child. The colleague. The stranger in the comments section. We start finding evidence everywhere of the injury we are carrying, even in the people who love us. The rage that has no clean target spreads across every available surface, and the people we share our lives with become the surfaces.

When rage folds inward, it becomes something else. Insomnia. Cortisol that does not turn off. Autoimmune flares. Period dysregulation. Libido vanishing. Depression. The collapse of joy as a real biological capacity. The body that was built to move through rage in waves is being asked to live inside it as climate, and the body cannot do that for long without paying.

This is what the women writing to me are trying to interrupt. They can feel themselves doing one of these things, or both. They can feel their relationships straining. They can feel their bodies under siege. They can feel themselves trying to manage the rage by either stuffing it down or scrolling it out, and neither is working.

The reason neither is working is that the rage is not designed to be managed. It is designed to move.

When rage cannot move, it does not become peace. It becomes one of those two modes. And the cost is real.

I want to name this with care, because the women writing to me are not wrong to be enraged. They are living inside a culture that has dismantled almost every sacred space that used to exist for moving collective rage. There are no public rituals. There are no community circles at scale. There are not priestesses on every street corner. There is no language for what is happening in your body. There is no roadmap. Of course the rage has nowhere to go. The architecture for it to go somewhere has been taken away from us.

What I want to offer is the architecture, in small pieces, that you can build back yourself.

Both directions

This is the heart of the teaching, and it is what I have been working with for thirty years.

The medicine goes in both directions.

Rage that is being suppressed must be allowed to express.

Rage that is spilling sideways must be given a container, witnessed, and brought to ground. The same rage, in two different bodies, needs different work.

The woman who has been swallowing her rage for years needs to give herself permission to feel it, voice it, move it. She needs to learn that her rage is not dangerous and that she is not dangerous when she feels it. She needs the rage to come up out of the basement and into her body where it can do its work.

The woman whose rage is spilling sideways needs the opposite. She needs not less rage, but more accurate rage. It would be so powerful for her to learn to feel it before it leaks. She needs witness and a sacred container so the rage has somewhere to go that is not the husband, the child, the friend. She needs the rage to come down out of the throat and into the belly where it can be felt, named, moved.

Most of us are doing some combination of both, in different domains. The same woman who suppresses her rage at work spills it onto her family at home. The same woman who explodes at her husband swallows her grief alone in the bath. The body cycles between repression and spillage because it does not have a third option.

The third option is what the teaching is.

The rage needs to be felt fully. With witness. With a sacred container. With somewhere for the energy to go. And then it needs to be allowed to release. Not bypassed, or suppressed, or just let go in the spiritual sense that almost nobody can actually do on command. Released because it has actually moved.

That is what transmutation is. It is not the rage becoming something nicer, it is the rage doing its work, in full, and then resolving into the next available state in the body. Which is often grief, sometimes clarity or even a precise action, and sometimes, eventually, joy.

The body knows how to do this. It has been waiting to be allowed.

The witness

If there is one teaching from thirty years of this work I would offer above all others, it is this.

Being witnessed in your rage is the medicine.

Not being talked down, or managed, or fixed. Witnessed. Another woman, or a circle of women, present, available, holding the field, while what is moving in you actually moves.

Some of the most powerful work I have ever done with women is in circle, where a woman finds her way into the full power of her own rage, in her body, with sound, with movement, with witness. And then she discovers, almost always for the first time in her life, that the rage is not dangerous, that she is not dangerous, that the rage moves through her and out the other side and leaves her cleaner and more available than she has been in years.

This is what the body has been asking for. Not less rage. Witnessed rage. Rage that has somewhere to go because someone is willing to stay in the room while it moves.

The reason so many of us are cycling through rage that cannot be transmuted is not that we are too angry. It is that we have nowhere to be angry that does not cost us our marriages, our jobs, our friendships, or our self-image. We have no sacred circles. We have no priestesses. We have no rituals. We have no rooms where the rage is welcome.

So we either hold it in until it folds inward, or we let it leak in the wrong directions.

The sacred circle is the medicine. If you have one, deepen into it. If you do not have one, build one. Three women, a kitchen table, regularity. Start there. The capacity to witness each other’s rage is one of the oldest medicines on earth, and we have almost forgotten we are allowed to use it.

How to move the rage

The practices. Use the ones that fit. Do them.

• Shake. Animals shake after threat. They tremble until the stored activation discharges, and then they get up. Humans have forgotten how. Put on music and shake, knees, shoulders, hands, the whole body. Five to ten minutes. You will feel ridiculous. Your body will know exactly what to do.

• Voice. Rage held silently calcifies. Rage voiced moves. Find a place where no one can hear you, a parked car, a forest, a pillow over your mouth, and let the sound out. Not words. Sound. Roar, scream, growl, howl. The body needs to make the noise the rage has been holding. One note: if you are releasing rage to a tree or a forest, please ask permission of the tree first. You can also dig a hole in the earth and release rage into the earth, again with permission.

• Move your body. Walk fast. Run. Dance. Drum. Chop wood. Dig the garden. The rage is kinetic energy. It wants to go somewhere. If you do not give it a destination, it goes inward and corrodes the host, or it spills sideways onto the nearest body.

• Breathe out. The long exhale. Inhale four counts, exhale eight, sigh audibly at the end. Five minutes. The long exhale tells the nervous system the threat has passed. The body cannot stay in rage when the breath has lengthened.

• Be witnessed. Another woman, a circle, a therapist who knows somatic work. The rage moves when it is seen. The rage does not move when it is hidden.

• Bring it to the altar. Candle, stone, photograph, flower. Speak the rage into the space. Name what has been done. Name who has done it. Name what you want to release. Let the ritual container hold what your nervous system is too small to hold alone.

• Act, precisely. Aligned action is itself a somatic discharge. Phone call to the representative. Hard conversation at the dinner table. Vote. Donation. Boundary held. Decision made. Piece written. Email sent. The action does not have to be large. It has to be true. The rage is asking what are you going to do about this. When you answer with something specific, the rage releases.

This is what transmutation actually is. Rage that has found its target and is now doing the work.

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The wider context

A few things for the women asking these questions.

• You did not get here alone. The cultural infrastructure for moving collective rage does not exist in our world. No public rituals. No community circles at scale. No priestesses on every street corner. No roadmap. The fact that you are trying to figure out what to do with the rage, in your kitchen, by yourself, is itself a sign of how much the culture has dismantled. You are not failing. You are inside a system that took the containers away and now sells you outrage as the substitute.

• The algorithm wants you in the loop. Every refresh, every scroll, every click on the next outrage, is making someone money from your nervous system. The architecture of attention is designed to keep you cycling, because cycling is engagement and engagement is the product. Get off the feed when you can. The feed is not the work.

• Some of the rage is not yours. When personal injury fuses with collective injury, your rage at the man who betrayed you fusing with your rage at every man who has ever betrayed a woman, your body cannot tell the difference, and the rage stops being moveable. The lineage rage belongs at the altar, in the circle, in the political action. The personal rage belongs in the personal reckoning. Both are real. Neither benefits from being fused.

• You will fail at this. You will move the rage one day and spill it the next. You will start the practice and stop the practice. You will find yourself at 3am refreshing the feed and hating yourself for it. This is fine. This is the work. The capacity is itself a practice. You are meant to keep coming back.

What is available on the other side

You are not less angry. You are just less haunted. The rage rises when something needs it to rise, and it does its work, and it releases.

You are more focused. Your actions are more precise. You save your fire for what actually matters.

You are more available. To your body, your people, your work, your joy. You have not had to wall any of it off in order to manage the rage, because the rage is no longer something to be managed.

You are still standing in your no. You have not become soft in the way the culture means soft. You are still the woman the structures of harm are afraid of. You are just no longer their unintended ally, the woman so exhausted by holding the rage in failure-mode that you cannot build anything new.

You are building the new. That is what the moving of the rage frees you to do.

A close

I did not save the relationship I told you about at the start. The damage I did from inside the rage was too thorough. That is part of what I carry.

What I did save was myself. With the practices above. With sacred circles of women who let me rage and did not try to fix me. With altars I built in my own house. With actions I took, small and large, that gave the rage somewhere to go. With sleep and water and food and breath. With the willingness to admit that some of the rage was not actually about him, was older than him, was the inheritance I had been carrying since I was a small girl in a kitchen learning to keep myself safe with the only tools I had been given.

I am still doing this work. I will probably be doing it for the rest of my life. The rage rises. Sometimes I move it cleanly. Sometimes I do not. The practice is the practice.

What is different now is that I know what I am inside when I am inside it. I can usually feel the loop as it starts. I can usually find my way back to the practices.

This is what I want for you. Not less rage. Better relationship with rage. Rage as ally, not as jailer. Rage that moves through, does its work, and releases you back to your own life.

You have a life on the other side of this rage. You have work the world is waiting for. You have love to give that you cannot give while you are locked. You have a body that wants to be alive in you.

The rage was never meant to take any of this from you. The rage was meant to protect it.

Move the rage. Use the rage. Trust that what the rage was protecting is still there, on the other side of the moving, waiting for you to come back.

I will be there too.

in love and devotion, Elayne Kalila

If this piece moved something in you, share it with the women you love. Send it to your circle. Take it to your altar. The work is in the moving. Sacred Reckoning begins August 2026.

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I have been thinking about a boys.

All of the boys. The ones we are losing right now, in plain sight, while the world that should have raised them looks the other way.

The fourteen-year-old in his bedroom in Manchester or Minneapolis or Mumbai, alone with his phone, an algorithm doing its work on his nervous system.

The seventeen-year-old in a Minnesota high school who just got an email from a National Guard recruiter telling him that enlisting could keep ICE from taking his mother.

The twenty-two-year-old who has just been hired by ICE itself, who applied along with eighty thousand others when the age cap was removed in August.

The boy in the men’s group chat passing around the Tate clip. The boy who shot the woman he had been told he was entitled to.

But I have also been thinking about the boy in our kitchen.

My older brother. Angry, lost, needing direction and holding that did not come, missing our mum in a way that was somehow even more excruciating than mine. I have written about him before. I have not written about the boy inside him.

I have been thinking about that boy a lot.

The Boys Who Broke My heart

And I have been thinking about the boys I met more than a decade ago in the eastern Congo, when I was working with the City of Joy and the women on its staff team, sharing a trauma healing curriculum I had developed called the Safe Embrace. The City of Joy is the sanctuary V founded in Bukavu for women survivors of the genocidal sexual violence that has been used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for thirty years. The women on the staff there have lived through what no human being should live through.

But the boys I want to tell you about, I met at the hospital. Panzi Hospital, also in Bukavu, the hospital Dr. Denis Mukwege built and tends, where the women who have survived the violence go for the surgical repair and medical care their bodies need before any of the rest of the healing can begin. The hospital is the first ground. It is where the body is given back to itself.

The boys I met there were the boys who had done the violence. Or boys like them.

They were former child soldiers. Stolen from their villages when they were nine, ten, eleven. Forcibly recruited into the factional guerrilla groups that have run the eastern Congo as a charnel house for decades. Shamed, beaten, intimidated, and broken into doing horrendous acts of violence against women. By twelve, thirteen, fourteen, they had done things their nervous systems could not metabolise and their souls could not yet understand. By fifteen, sixteen, some of them had been rescued. Pulled out by NGOs, returned to villages that did not want them back, given to programmes that were trying to reintegrate boys who had committed atrocities into communities that had been on the receiving end of them.

When I met some of these boys, they had been in the programmes for a few years. They had done their grief work, in whatever way the programmes could carry them through it. They had been received, witnessed, slowly returned to themselves by elders who refused to write them off.

And they were playing drums at the hospital.

For the women.

I want you to see this image with me, my loves. Because it is one of the most theologically loaded images I have ever stood inside.

The hospital where the women were being put back together. Surgical wards, recovery rooms, the slow medical work of mending bodies that had been catastrophically violated. The women in their hospital beds and their hospital gowns, lying in the ground floor of healing where the body itself is being given back to them. And the boys, formerly soldiers, formerly the hands of the violence, sitting at the edge of the ward, playing the drums.

Holding the rhythm for the women whose bodies they had been part of breaking.

That is what initiation actually looks like. That is what the noble masculine actually looks like, when it has been recovered from the broken boy. He does not arrive in his glory and apologise. He sits down at the edge of the hospital ward and plays the drums for the women he has hurt, and he does it for as long as it takes, and his body slowly learns what his hands were always for.

I have been carrying that image for over a decade. It comes back to me now because what we are watching unfold across the western world is what happens when there is no one to do that work with the boys.

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A word before I begin

I am writing in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside are polarity cosmologies. These are a few traditions among many. There are cosmologies that do not run on polarity, and humans whose interior experience is not held by these poles. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.

What the data actually says

Let me name what is happening, because it has to be named clearly before we can talk about what is underneath it.

Eighty per cent of British boys aged sixteen and seventeen have consumed content created by Andrew Tate. Only sixty per cent of boys in the same age group have heard of the British Prime Minister. Read that twice. They know the misogynist influencer better than they know the head of their own government. Fifty-six per cent of young fathers under thirty-five in the UK approve of him.

Forty per cent of adult American men, and half of younger American men, say they trust one or more men’s rights, anti-feminist, or pro-violence voices from the manosphere. Two-thirds of young men regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. Two-thirds of young men say no one really knows me.

Far-right extremism in the West has risen by two hundred and fifty per cent in the last five years. Radicalisation that once took months or years now typically takes days, sometimes hours, because the short-form algorithm has been engineered for it. Teachers in Canada are reporting misogynist and extremist beliefs in students as young as eleven and twelve.

Last year in the UK, a young man named Kyle Clifford murdered his ex-partner, her sister, and her mother. Within twenty-four hours of the killings, he had watched videos by Andrew Tate. The judge at trial called Tate a poster boy for misogynists.

Meanwhile, in August of last year, the Department of Homeland Security removed all age caps for ICE recruitment. Anyone over eighteen can now apply. The agency received over eighty thousand applications in the first week. The goal is to hire ten thousand new immigration officers, backed by nearly thirty billion dollars in federal funding. Boys who were in high school last year are now being trained to disappear other people’s mothers from grocery store parking lots.

And in Minneapolis in January, a National Guard recruiter sent an email to around two hundred high school students with the subject line I know it is scary out there, pointing to ICE operations and telling the students that if they enlisted, they might be able to keep ICE from taking their parents.

This is what the recruitment of the next generation of young men looks like in 2026. The manosphere on one side, taking the lonely ones into misogyny and far-right radicalisation through the algorithm. The state security apparatus on the other side, taking the frightened ones into enforcement work through the threat of what will happen to their mothers if they refuse. And in between, the boys.

The boys are being harvested.

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They are not lost because they hate

I want to be careful here, because the easy story is the wrong story.

The boys joining the manosphere are not joining because they hate women. Not at the beginning. Most of them arrive looking for advice on fitness, on dating, on how to make money, on how to be a man in a world that has stopped teaching them what that means. The misogyny is not the entry point. The misogyny is what they are taught once they have arrived inside an ecosystem that has them captive.

The boys joining ICE are not joining because they hate immigrants. Many of them are immigrants themselves, or sons of immigrants. They are joining because there is a paycheck. Because there is a uniform. Because somebody told them that putting on that uniform would make them somebody. Because the alternative is the slow grind of underemployment and loneliness and the suspicion, never quite spoken, that nobody has ever actually seen them as a man.

The boy in our kitchen, my brother, was not angry because he was bad. He was angry because his mum had been sick most of his life, his dad was overwhelmed, the village had not gathered around him, and there was no man in his world who could say to him I see you, you are mine, I will walk you through this. He was a boy who had been left to figure it out, and what a boy left to figure it out usually finds is a hard surface he can hit until he forgets what he is missing.

The men on Motherless were once boys whose tenderness was shamed out of them so completely that they cannot, as adults, bear to be witnessed by a whole woman with her eyes open. The men in the Epstein files were once boys who learned, somewhere, that intimacy was a thing to be taken rather than something to be entered together. The men passing the legislation against women’s bodies are sitting in the gerontocracy of broken boys, none of whom were ever called into the noble masculine by an older man who could have done it.

Andrew Tate himself was once a boy. His father, the chess master Emory Tate, was a complicated man, and Andrew grew up between Chicago and Luton, in a household and a culture that produced the man he became. The misogyny he sells now is the misogyny of a boy who learned, somewhere very young, that the only way to survive the wound of his own tenderness was to weaponise it against women. He is what happens when no one reaches the boy. He is now the recruiting officer for the next generation of unreached boys.

This is what we are looking at , its systemic, my loves.

The boys are not lost because they hate. They are lost because they are starving. And what they are starving for is the same thing my brother was starving for in our kitchen. The same thing the boys in the eastern Congo had been starving for when the guerrilla groups found them. The same thing the seventeen-year-old in Minneapolis is starving for when the recruiter writes to him with the subject line I know it is scary out there.

They are starving to be seen. To be received. To be initiated into something real. To be told, by an adult man they respect, what their strength is for.

When no one reaches them, the algorithm reaches them. The recruiter reaches them. The Tate brothers reach them. The militia reaches them. The Discord server reaches them. Someone always reaches them, because every boy has to belong somewhere, and a boy who is not gathered into the noble masculine is, by simple physics, going to be gathered into something else.

The boys are not the problem.

The vacuum is the problem.

The boy inside the man

I want to say something now that I have been saying for years and that I want to say again, because it is the diagnosis that holds the whole system together.

The boy is in there.

In every man we are watching hurt women, abuse children, bully his way into more power, legislate against bodies that are not his, post in the manosphere, drug his wife, knock on the door at six in the morning to deport his neighbours. The boy is in there. The boy who was crushed before he had a chance to grow into the noble man. The boy whose tenderness was shamed. The boy whose grief was mocked. The boy whose body learned that softness was a way to be eaten.

That boy did not disappear. He went underground. He hardened. He learned to perform a version of himself that the locker room and the playground and the family dinner could not destroy. And now, in middle age, in the late thirties, in the sixties and the seventies, he is running the world from inside a body that has been carrying him since he was nine.

What we are seeing in public is the visible expression of the boy in private. Andrew Tate is a boy. The man at the legislature is a boy. The man on Motherless is a boy. The man in the boardroom who cannot make eye contact with the woman he has been working alongside for a decade is a boy. They are all the same boy at different amplitudes, expressing through different surfaces, in different costumes, with different access to power. But the wound is one wound. The crushing is one crushing.

This is the part that almost nobody can bear to look at, because if it is true, it asks something of us. It asks us to see, in the most monstrous-seeming behaviour, the boy who was never reached. Not to excuse him. Not to absolve him. To diagnose him correctly. Because if the diagnosis is correct, the intervention can be correct. And the intervention is not more punishment for the grown man. The intervention is reaching the boy.

The boy who is currently fourteen.

The boy who is currently twenty-two and applying to ICE.

The boy who is currently fifty-six and has been a man on paper for forty years and has never, not once, been seen by an older man as the boy he still is.

All of them need the same thing.

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What these boys need

This is very close to my heart and I have been saying in my other articles in particular What Happens When the World is Fatherless. But I want to say it again because I think it is so important.

• They need to be seen. Not lectured to. Seen, as the boys they are, by adult men and women who can hold what they actually carry without flinching.

• They need elders. Men who have done their own work. Men who have crossed thresholds and come back changed. Men who have stopped pretending. Men who can say to a boy I see who you are. I see what you are carrying. Come sit with me. I will walk you through this.

• They need rites of passage. Real ones. Not the empty corporate version, not the abstract spiritual version. The kind where a boy is taken away from his mother and his phone and his algorithm, by a circle of older men, and put through something difficult, and brought back changed, and presented to his community as a young man with a name and a place at the fire.

• They need ritual, music, drumming, work, the physical body, the hands doing something that matters. The Congo boys playing drums at the hospital is not a metaphor. It is the actual structure. The body learning what it was always for through repetition, presence, witness, and time.

• They need men’s circles. Not the corporate networking version. The real one. Older men gathering younger men around fires, around tables, around grief, around the work of becoming a noble man. Boys to Men Mentoring has done this with fifteen thousand boys. The Brotherhood Program. Journeymen. The Becoming A Man programme that started in Chicago and now runs in over two hundred schools across America, Boston, Kansas City, Dallas, Washington DC, London. Coaching Boys Into Men, where athletic coaches are trained to do the work because for many boys the coach is the closest thing to a father they have. These programmes exist. They are working. They are wildly underfunded. They are the thing that actually moves boys away from the manosphere and into something whole.

• They need fathers who have done their own work. Not heroes. Fathers. Men who have sat with their own father wound, their own mother wound, their own shame, and come back capable of being present to their sons. This is the longest work and the most necessary one. The fathers of the next generation of boys are the men who are currently in their thirties and forties, many of whom have never been initiated themselves. They cannot give what they have not received. They have to receive it first.

• They need mothers who can hold them as boys without trying to make them into the men they have already failed to be. A mother who can mother her son into his own becoming, who can love him fiercely without taking responsibility for his manhood, who can call in the father, the uncle, the elder, the men’s circle, the rites of passage programme, the mentor. The mothers cannot do the men’s work, but the mothers can refuse to do it for them, and that refusal is part of how the boys are released into the work of becoming.

• They need the older men to come back into the room. This is the most urgent ask of this moment, and I want to be direct about it. The older men in this culture have largely retreated. Some out of disenfranchisement, some out of fatigue, some out of the unkind cultural air that has made being an older man feel like a kind of unwelcome. I understand the impulse. The seclusion is not the answer. The boys are being lost to ICE recruiters and militias and Andrew Tate because the older men withdrew, and the void you left has been filled by people who profit from your absence. The boys are looking for fathers and elders and finding only people who monetise their loneliness. You can do better than that. They need you to.

To the mothers of sons

I want to say something specifically to the mothers, because I know many of you are reading this with a fourteen-year-old in your house, watching what is moving through him, terrified.

You are not crazy. What you are sensing is real. The algorithm has him. The Discord server has him. The boy at school who has been getting deeper into the manosphere has him. The Tate clip his cousin sent him last week has him. You can feel him slipping, in small ways, and you cannot quite find the words to reach him.

I want to say two things to you.

The first is that this is not yours to fix alone. You cannot mother him into manhood. That is not a failure on your part. That is the architecture. Boys need to be initiated by older men into the noble masculine, and that work cannot be done by mothers, even the most fierce and present mothers in the world. What you can do is refuse to let the algorithm and the Tate brothers be the only voices reaching him. You can find the men’s circle, the mentor, the coach, the uncle, the godfather, the rites of passage programme. Bring them in. The men who are doing this work want to be doing it. Many of them are sitting around waiting for boys to be sent to them.

The second is that you have to keep loving him. Even when he is performing the Tate posture in your kitchen. Even when he is repeating things that frighten you. Even when his eyes go cold for a moment and you do not recognise him. The boy is still in there. The boy still needs his mother. Not to agree with the posture, not to soften your truth, not to manage his feelings. Just to keep loving the boy underneath the costume, while also refusing the costume itself.

Your love alone will not bring him home. But your love is part of the architecture that can hold him while the men do their work. Hold the line. Find the men. Refuse the algorithm. Pray, light a candle, keep him in your fierce attention. The boy is still reachable. He has not gone yet.

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What we do now

There is grounded action available, my loves. Let me name some of it.

Find a mentoring or rites of passage programme.

• The Becoming A Man (BAM) programme at Youth Guidance, in two hundred schools across the US and London — youth-guidance.org.

• Boys To Men Mentoring Network in California and beyond — boystomen.org.

• Journeymen Triangle in North Carolina and Journeymen Institute on Vashon Island, Washington — journeymen.us and journeymentriangle.org.

• Rite of Passage Journeys for boys in the Pacific Northwest — riteofpassagejourneys.org.

• The Brotherhood Program at Community Change Inc — communitychangeinc.com.

• Coaching Boys Into Men, which trains athletic coaches in dating violence prevention — search for it locally.

Support the older men’s work.

• ManKind Project — mankindproject.org.

• Sacred Sons — sacredsons.com.

• Evryman — evryman.com.

Send the man in your life. Donate. Talk about these programmes openly.

• If you are a father, do your own work. Find a men’s circle. Find a therapist. Find an elder. Sit with your father wound. You cannot father a boy from inside a wound you have not addressed. Start where you are. The work is available.

• If you are an older man, come back into the room. Your generation is sitting on the lineage. The boys cannot find it without you. Mentor one boy this year. Just one. The boy down the street whose father is not present. The nephew. The son of your colleague. The boy in your congregation. Reach him. Be reachable.

• Watch what your sons are watching. Not as surveillance, as company. Sit with them. Ask them what they are seeing. Do not lecture. Ask. Listen. Then offer them something else. The Brian Cox documentary instead of the Tate clip. The Wim Hof breath work instead of the Liver King supplement scam. The boys are looking for something to be inside. Give them better things.

• Refuse the framing that men cannot be reached. Refuse the language that turns all men into monsters. Refuse to write off the boys, even the ones who have hurt people, even the ones in the militia, even the ones who have already gone deep. The Congo boys came back. The redpillers in the studies are showing up on the deradicalisation forums having woken up. The men in the men’s circles are doing the work. The boys can come home. Hold that as fact, in your body, against every story that says they cannot.

What I believe

Here is what I believe in my deepest heart.

The boy is in every man we are afraid of. He is also in every man we love.

The crushing of the universal boy is the deepest wound this culture is carrying, and it is the wound from which most of the other visible wounds flow. The website. The legislation. The masculinity podcasts. The militia. The ICE recruitment. The boys who shoot the women they were told they were entitled to. All of it is what happens when the universal boy is crushed before he can become the noble man.

But the boy can be reached. The Congo proved it to me. The men who write to me every week prove it to me. The fifteen thousand boys who have come through Boys To Men prove it. The two hundred schools running BAM prove it. The fathers re-fathering themselves in their men’s circles prove it. The older men who have come out of seclusion prove it.

The current dying sick system is not destiny. It is an architecture. It can be built differently. It is being built differently, in pockets, in small rooms, in circles around fires, in school basements at lunchtime, in retreat centres in the mountains, in drumming circles in Bukavu.

We have to scale this work. We have to fund it. We have to talk about it. We have to send our boys to it and our men into the work that supports it. We have to refuse to let the manosphere and ICE and the Discord servers be the only forces moving on the boys.

The noble masculine is not dead. He is sitting at the edge of the circle. He is drumming for the women he has hurt, and he is also drumming for the boys who will come after him, the ones who do not yet know the rhythm but will learn it because someone is holding it for them.

If this piece moved something in you, send it to a mother of sons. Send it to a father. Send it to a man you know who has been doing the work quietly for years and deserves to know that what he is doing matters. The boys are waiting to be reached.

We can do this, my loves.

The boys can come home.

But only if we go and get them.

In love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

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For most of my younger life, I was a woman who knew how to incinerate a man.

This is the letter I have been afraid to write. To my enraged women. On how we speak to the men we love when the world is on fire.

I learned it young. My older brother was angry, and he was bigger than me, and I was scared of him. I did not know how to stand up for myself in any other way, so I sharpened my tongue into something that could cut him in half before he had finished his sentence. It was not a choice. It was a survival. The only one I could find.

And then, as I grew up, I became aware. Of the horrid inequity between women and men. Of the perils and abhorrences of patriarchy. Of the long bloody history we have been living inside. And the fury I had honed in the small kitchen for my angry brother fused, suddenly, with the fury of three thousand years of women, and I became a young woman who was angry with men. Period. Full stop. I would not have said it that cleanly at the time, but my body had said it, and my mouth knew.

So I had really good practice. I learned, early, exactly which sentence would unmake a man across a kitchen, across a meeting, across a bed. I became the castrating queen. I was effective. And it cost me everything I most wanted.

I know I am not alone in this.

After thirty years of working with women, I know only too well how easily we hone this ability, the blade of our words, used to protect and to obliterate at the same time. We get good at it because we had to. We pass it down to each other without quite meaning to. We mistake the sharpness for sovereignty, and only later, sometimes much later, notice what it has cost us, and the people we love.

I have spent the last decades learning a different art. A different kind of sharpening. The art of saying the true thing in fewer words, without the desire to destroy underneath them. The art of letting my words mean what they mean, without arming them first.

What I have learned, slowly, is that the less I say, the more easily I am heard.

When I share a feeling in a thousand words, building the case for it, explaining it, justifying it, anticipating every defence and pre-emptively dismantling it, the feeling itself disappears underneath the construction. The person across from me, regardless of who they are, stops being able to find me. By the time I am done, I have made my feeling airtight, and unreceivable.

The same feeling, in twenty words, lands.

This is not about men needing it simpler, or women being too much, or any of the old tired stereotypes that get reached for in this conversation. This is about something more interesting. The thousand words are not for him. The thousand words are old armour. The thousand words are the part of me that learned, very young, that my feelings would only be received if I could prove they were warranted, justified, defensible.

The heart-forward woman in me does not need her feelings to be justified and she does not need a sword in her mouth either. She just feels them. And speaks them, cleanly, in as few words as it takes. And lets the room do what the room does.

I am still learning her. Some days I do this beautifully. Some days I absolutely build the thousand-word case again, or feel the old blade rise, and watch the room go quiet, and notice it too late. Ha.

So this is the letter.

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A word about the title

Hysterical comes from the Greek hystera, meaning womb. For more than two thousand years, this word has been used against us. Hippocrates believed the womb wandered through a woman’s body causing chaos. Medieval doctors burned women for hysteria. Victorian physicians sent us to asylums, prescribed forced bed rest, performed clitoridectomies, called every woman’s grief and rage and refusal a disease of the female mind. Freud built his early career on diagnosing us with it. The American Psychiatric Association did not remove hysteria from its diagnostic manual until 1980.

The word has been weaponised against every woman who refused to be quiet. Against every woman who knew the truth before the room was ready to hear it. Against every woman who was right and was told she was crazy. Against every woman whose body said no and whose culture said that is your problem, not ours.

I am taking it back.

What this culture has called hysterical is, in fact, often the most accurate response a we can have to a world that has gone insane. The rage is correct. The grief is correct. The refusal is correct. Our bodies that scream when they can no longer bear what we are being asked to bear is not malfunctioning. It is telling the truth.

So when I call this piece Hysterical, I am not using the word the way it has been used against us. I am returning it to its root. Hystera. The womb. The seat of life-giving power. The body that knows. The voice that names. The fire we have been told for two thousand years was our disease, when it has always been our medicine.

This is the letter from inside that medicine.

Link to The Hysterical Reckoning

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What we are sitting with

I have spent the last weeks writing into the reality of this moment in three pieces — Motherless, Fatherless, and Severed. The Mother in exile for ten thousand years. The noble masculine missing alongside her for four thousand. The Sacred Marriage driven underground for both. The first three pieces did the diagnosis. This one is the practice.

[Link to Motherless]

[Link to Fatherless]

[Link to Severed]

Something has been moving through all of us across these weeks. And what has become clear is that the conversation now has a fourth question, and the fourth question is ours.

We have named the wound. We have seen it. We are on fire. We have refused the premature reunion.

Now what?

How do we carry this rage. How do we speak now. How do we walk out of a dance that has been running for thousands of years, without either swallowing our fire, which we will not do, or letting it burn down the very people we are trying to call home.

That is what this piece is about. And before I go any further, I need to be very clear about the ground I am standing on.

To my women readers

I am not asking you to swallow your truth, diminish your rage, manage their feelings, or make yourself more palatable.

I am not asking you to take responsibility for men’s inability to hear us. I am not asking you to carry one more ounce of what was never ours to carry.

What I am asking is different. And I know it is much harder.

I am asking us to grow up without losing one drop of our fire.

Because here is what I have learned, in my own body, after thirty years of watching this loop run inside myself and inside the women I love. Our righteous rage burns the room down and changes nothing. It feels powerful in the moment, and then we are alone again, and the men we love are further away than they were before we opened our mouths. And the structures we are raging at are still standing.

The flamethrower has not worked. We have thousands of years of evidence.

The awakened feminine — midlife maven, empress, queen, whichever name lands true for you — might.

This is not softening. It is exactitude. The sword we carry when our heart is open is sharper than any flamethrower has ever been, because it cuts cleanly through the specific structure doing the specific harm. And it does not waste itself on the men we love, who are not the structure.

It is time for us to take the raw rage we rightly feel and forge it into sword. To find the sacred beneath the flame.

A note as I begin. I write in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside —Hermetic, Celtic, Alchemical, Tantric, Magdalene — share a polarity cosmology. These are a few traditions among many. There are cosmologies that do not run on polarity, and humans whose interior experience is not held by these poles. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.

The fury is real and the fury is holy

We are furious. We have every reason to be.

The Epstein files keep opening and closing and opening again. We have an administration legislating women’s bodies as though women themselves have nothing to contribute to the conversation about their own bodies. There is the daily ordinary violence in homes we will never see, in numbers so staggering that to sit with them is to feel something in our hearts actually break. There is the Motherless website, the Telegram group, the drugged wives, the eyelids held open, the twenty dollars a viewer.

And right now, there is a reckoning that millions of us are walking through at once, where we are saying what the actual fuck is going on and what can I do about it? And we are saying it at full volume.

This is our sacred rage. This is our holy fire. This is, IMHO, exactly what this moment is asking of us.

And…

What I know from my own life is this. We rehearse the maiming sentence in the shower, in the car, in the hour before he comes home from work. We have rehearsed it so many times that some of us have forgotten we could say something else.

And when we deliver it, when we turn toward the men in our lives with that fire at full volume, something happens we need to talk about honestly.

They shut down. They close. They protect.

They go quiet, or defensive, or cold, or away. Sometimes all four in an afternoon.

And we are left holding the fire with no one to hand it to. And we get more furious. And the next time we speak, the fire is hotter. And the next time they hear us, the wall is thicker. Round and round we go, in a loop that has been running in our relationships, our families, our workplaces, our parliaments, for generations.

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What the loop has cost us

On the personal level. It means you have spent more nights than you can count alone in the bed next to a man who used to be able to reach you and now cannot. There is a sentence you have wanted to say to him for ten years, and you have not yet found the way to say it that does not blow up the room.

On the relational level. It means your son is fourteen and has already learned to flinch when you walk into the room, because he does not yet know which mother he is getting. It means your father called and you could not pick up the phone.

On the generational level. Your mother was furious her whole life and never had a way to forge it, and she passed it down to you. Your daughter is watching you now. She is learning her whole life from how you handle this.

On the cultural level. Thirty years of feminist anger and the structures are still standing. The men who run the world have learned to wait us out, to weather the storm, to know that maiden rage will burn itself out eventually. The patriarchy, IMHO, would actually like us to keep running this loop. A diffuse rage is a manageable rage.

On the spiritual level. We have not yet become the women we were supposed to become. The priestess in us, the one who knows how to wield fire with precision, has been waiting for us to grow into her, and we have been too busy being the maiden to come and meet her.

That is what the loop has cost us. That is what running it for one more decade would cost the women coming after us.

I am not interested in paying that price again.

The young woman’s rage and the awakened woman’s rage

The young woman’s rage is raw and necessary. It is the scream of the girl who has been silenced, and she had to scream. Nobody gets to tell her not to. I have been that girl. You have been that girl. We all carry her, and we always will.

The awakened woman’s rage is something different. It is still fire. It is still real. It is still dangerous, in the good way. What it is also is aimed. It knows what it wants to illuminate. It can hold itself long enough to ask the question instead of only delivering the verdict. It can speak to the person in front of it as though that person has the capacity to rise.

We have been doing the young woman’s rage for generations. I built a whole life out of it. Some days I still do.

But we have many years of evidence now. The young woman’s rage has not moved the men.

The awakened one might.

Why the frequency matters

When we speak to the men from pure rage, we are not actually speaking to the noble masculine. We are speaking to the defended boy underneath the armour. The boy who learned very young that feeling anything was dangerous, and that being vulnerable was a way to get hurt.

And the defended boy does what defended boys do. He hides. He hits back. He runs. Every time.

The noble masculine, the man we are actually trying to reach, lives underneath that boy. He is the part of him that wants to protect. That wants to build. That wants to be trusted by a woman he respects. That wants, at the deepest level, to be worthy of the love he is being offered.

He cannot be summoned by force. He can only be invited. Not begged. Not bargained with. Not coddled. Invited.

When we speak from the awakened woman in us, that is the frequency he can hear. Not because the words are softer. Because the aim is true.

This is a different frequency entirely. Bodies know the difference.

How we speak to the men now

These are not a formula. These are the practices I am learning, ungracefully, mostly in the middle of my own kitchen.

One. Speak to what you want to see.

The noble masculine will not show up when you are addressing his broken self. You are not making contact with him, because you are not speaking to him. You are speaking to the wound, and the wound will defend itself.

Speak past the wound. I know you are more than this. I am talking to the man I know is in there. Watch what happens. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes a crack of light. Sometimes a whole landslide of relief, because somebody finally saw him.

Two. Voicing, not unloading.

There is a difference between this is how your actions affected me and this is everything wrong with you and your entire gender and the five thousand years of your mistakes. Both might be accurate. Only one is survivable across the table.

When I need to unload, I take it to the sisters, to the page, to the earth, to the scream in the car with the windows up. When I need to voice, I bring it, clean, to the man in front of me.

Three. Refuse the either-or.

Do not let the conversation become either I love you or I am furious with you. Either you are the noble masculine or you are the monster.

Both is the only true answer. You love him and what he did is not okay. You need him and he has failed you. He is capable of more and he is, right now, not meeting you. Stay in your own ground. Speak what is true. Want him to receive it. And do not require that he receive it in order for you to remain whole.

Four. Call him by his real name.

His real name is not men. His real name is not the patriarchy. His real name is the one his own father probably never called him.

When I have spoken to the noble masculine in a man directly, not as flattery, not as manipulation, but as genuine address to the part of him I know is real, I have watched men change in my lifetime. Not all. Some. Enough to be worth doing.

Five. Stop doing it for them.

This is the one I have to keep learning. Ha.

It is not our job to heal him. It is not our job to parent him. It is not our job to carry his unprocessed grief on top of our own. Our job is to stop mistaking his uninitiated self for who he actually is, and to hold the door of initiation open while he decides whether he is going to walk through it.

Some will. Some will not. Both are true. Neither is our responsibility.

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What it actually sounds like

Because theory is lovely, but what most of us need is language we can use on a given Tuesday.

What is happening to women right now is real. It is in this house. It is in this bed. It is in this body. And I need you to be the kind of man who can hear that without collapsing, because I am not willing to carry this alone anymore.

I am not asking you to agree with me. I am asking you to be with me while I tell you the truth about how I feel.

When you shut down, I lose you. And when I lose you, I lose the person I was supposed to be building this life with. I do not want to lose you. I want you to stay.

I believe you are capable of more than you are currently doing. That is why I am still in this conversation.

When we speak like this we are still on fire. Still in our truth. Still unwilling to be silenced. And we are speaking to the man we love as though he is capable of rising. Because he is. Most of them are. Most of them have simply never, in their whole lives, been spoken to that way.

The piece I know some of you will push back on

We do have to take responsibility for how we use our words.

I know. I can hear the intake of breath from here. Ha. Stay with me.

This is not because the men deserve our careful packaging. It is not because their feelings are more important than our truth. We have done quite enough of that for one civilisation, thank you.

It is because we are calling ourselves into our truth and power and awakened heart. We must be willing to grow into our maturity too. Because our words carry frequency. Because what we speak into a room we are co-creating, whether we like it or not. Because the wild feminine, unharnessed, does not birth the new world. She burns the old one down, and then the next generation inherits the ashes and has to start again from nothing.

We are not here to leave our children ashes.

We are here to call in the noble masculine. To hold the fire and the invitation at the same time. To be both the sword and the door.

This is maturity. This is what midlife has been preparing us for. This is Saturn in Aries asking us to grow the fuck up without losing one drop of our fire.

And the ones who will not meet us

Some are too committed to the structures that protect them. Some are too afraid of what they would have to feel in order to actually change. Some are already so far inside the broken masculine that there is, in this lifetime, no reaching them.

I am not calling those men home. I am not asking you to.

I am talking about the men who can be reached. The husbands. The brothers. The fathers. The sons. The colleagues. The friends. The ones who have been waiting, some of them for decades, for a woman to speak to the noble masculine in them and mean it.

The ones who will not come, will not come. Our job is not to keep throwing ourselves against their walls. Our job is to stand in our ground, speak our truth, call forward what can be called forward, and walk anyway.

But call him forward, first.

What we do now

For the women.

Find your altar. A corner, a windowsill, a shelf. A candle. A stone. A photograph of the women in your line. Light it before you write a message or have a conversation you know is going to be hard.

Find three women. Make a circle that does not break. This is where the fire that needs to spray goes, so that by the time you arrive at the kitchen counter with the man you love, the fire in your hand is clean. Three women. A kitchen table. Regularity. Start it this week.

Have one clear conversation with one specific man this week. Not all of them. One. The one where the loop is running hot. I want to come back to what you said yesterday because I had a reaction to it and I want to tell you what the reaction was. Try it. See what happens.

Read. Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run with the Wolves. Marion Woodman on the awakened woman. Stand on their shoulders.

For the brave men who might also be reading.

Breathe before you defend. Just one breath. Long enough to ask yourself, am I hearing the wound under the fire. If you can stay in the room thirty seconds longer than your nervous system wants to, something different becomes possible.

Take this piece to another man this week. Not to a woman. To another man. Read it together. The women in your life cannot do the work of initiating other men into the noble masculine. Only you can.

Write back. Not to defend. Not to explain. Just to say I read this and here is what moved in me. Breaking the silence on your side of the conversation is part of how the loop ends.

Back to the practising

I want to come back to where I started.

Because the holy woman’s work does not happen just at the altar in the temple. It happens at the kitchen counter. In the bedroom. In the half-second before the castrating sentence comes out of your mouth, in the breath that lets you say something true and brief instead.

That half-second is the work. That half-second is where the new world is being built. One conversation at a time. One sentence at a time. One woman at a time, choosing the priestess over the maiden, choosing the forge over the spray, choosing twenty true words over a thousand defended ones.

Some days I do this beautifully. Some days I absolutely do not. Ha.

But every day I am practising. Because I am not going to be the woman who passes this loop on to the women coming after me.

We have been the maiden. We have been the castrating queen. We have been the woman with the razor sharp tongue, and we earned every inch of that fire, and I will not let anyone tell you otherwise.

But the world that is trying to be born now does not need the maiden’s fire alone. It needs ours. The forged kind. The aimed kind. The kind that knows the difference between the structure we must dismantle and the man at the kitchen counter. The kind that can hold a flame in one hand and the open door in the other. The kind that can say the true thing in twenty words and let it land.

Let us be those women.

Not because the men deserve it.

Because we know what we are.

We are the holy women of the next era. The fire is in our hands. The altar is beneath it. And the world needs all of us, sword and door at the same time, calling them home.

If this piece moved something in you, send it to one woman who needs it. Send it to one man who is ready to be in this conversation. The work is in the passing.

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The concerns I keep hearing, in many different forms:

• The site is only off temporarily.

• Where are the arrests?

• The men in the Telegram groups are still out there.

• The traffic will simply migrate to another platform.

• The men who did this have not been held to account.

I want to say, clearly, that I agree with all of you!

Of course the site can come back, and most likely will. The Dutch had jurisdiction over the hardware sitting in their territory. They did not have jurisdiction over the brand. The .com can be re-pointed to new servers in another country, and activists and reporters expect it will be. Cocoland resurfaced last month in the Coco Islands after Coco was taken down for its role in the Pelicot case.

The men who used the site have not been named, charged, prosecuted, or held publicly accountable. The Telegram groups are still active. The wider ecosystem of drug-facilitated sexual assault has not been dismantled. The architecture I have been writing about in Motherless, Fatherless, and Unmothered is still standing.

The men who did this have not been held to account

I do not want to soften any of this.

I want every reader of this page to hold the realism with both hands. The takedown is one node in a vast system. It is not the end of the work. It is not the end of the system. It is not even the end of this particular site, which can resurface tomorrow under another domain in another jurisdiction.

And…

I also want us to hold the win.

Because here is what I know about how cultural change actually moves. It does not move by anyone waiting for the perfect, total, final dismantling. It moves by the accumulation of small interruptions, each one teaching the system that its assumed impunity is not absolute. Each one training the cultural body that the firewall can hold. Each one building the muscle memory for the next interruption, and the one after that.

We live in a world that tells us, every day, that the systems we are inside are immovable. That nothing changes. That our voices do not matter. That the architecture is too vast and too entrenched to be challenged. This is the lie the architecture must tell us to keep us complicit in our own captivity.

And every time something moves, we have to mark it. As proof that the system is not what it tells us it is.

So I am asking you, today, to hold both with me, for this is what I sense is the real work.

Hold the realism. The site can come back. The men have not been arrested. The shadow is still working, in plain sight, on platforms we cannot yet see. We have not won. We are nowhere near won.

And hold the win. Three hundred of you in conversation under one post. A site with eighty-two million visitors a month taken offline by Dutch authorities. A preliminary criminal investigation opened. A wave of women refusing to look away. A wave of men reading the piece in their circles and writing back in tears. A cultural body learning, in real time, that it has more power than it has been told it has.

Both are true. Both have to be carried.

What we can do now

I have been asked, in dozens of comments, what concrete steps people can take. So here they are. Specific, named, and doable this week. So lets keep our momentum lets make this happen. Lets keep sharing and talking and taking action.

Sign the UltraViolet petition.

UltraViolet, a leading women-led gender-justice organisation, built the petition that gathered more than 28,000 signatures calling on Google and major search engines to deplatform Motherless and all replica websites immediately. The petition is still live and is now pushing platforms to prevent the migration to lookalike sites.

Sign here: act.weareultraviolet.org/sign/no_search_for_abuse

For all of UltraViolet’s current campaigns, including ongoing pressure on tech platforms, Visa, Uber, TikTok, and more: weareultraviolet.org/take-action

Follow and support the #EndEyeCheck campaign.

Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope launched #EndEyeCheck, a survivor-led campaign targeting the legal loopholes that allow men to drug, rape and film their partners. The campaign is calling for new legislation to make the creation, possession, and distribution of such material a specific criminal offence, and for online platforms to be held legally accountable for hosting it. They are also raising funds to build an international support network for survivors, many of whom may not yet know they are survivors at all.

Search #EndEyeCheck on Instagram, X, and TikTok. Follow Zoe and Amanda. Share their interviews. The launch report from ITV News is here: itv.com/news/2026-05-06/survivors-launch-campaign-to-end-sexual-abuse-of-unconscious-women

To make contact with the campaign team, ITV is currently routing correspondence: investigations@itv.com

Read and share the original CNN investigation.

Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, and Niamh Kennedy reported the foundational piece that broke this open: Exposing a global “online rape academy” that is teaching men how to abuse women and evade detection. Every reader should know about it.

Read it here: cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl

For more from CNN’s wider series on gender inequality: cnn.com/interactive/asequals

Contact your representatives.

Ask them three specific questions. What is your government doing to investigate the men who used Motherless? What legislation are you supporting to criminalise the creation, possession, and distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery? What pressure are you putting on tech platforms to de-index and prevent the resurfacing of these sites?

Call. Email. Write publicly. Make them answer.

In the United States: Find your senators at senate.gov/senators and your representative at house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative. Or call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and they will connect you directly.

In the United Kingdom: Find your MP and write directly at theyworkforyou.com or writetothem.com.

In the European Union: Find your MEPs by country at europarl.europa.eu/meps.

In Canada: Find your MP at ourcommons.ca/members or represent.opennorth.ca.

Demand the prosecutions.

The Dutch Public Prosecution Service has confirmed that prosecutors in Zeeland-West-Brabant have opened a preliminary investigation. Watch this case. Share updates. Ask publicly when charges will be filed against the operators of the platform. If you are in the Netherlands, write to the Dutch Public Prosecution Service. If you are not, ask your own justice ministry what cooperation they are offering and what investigations they are opening into the men in your jurisdiction who used the site.

Dutch Public Prosecution Service: om.nl

To report content and seek support in the US: Call the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673, or chat at online.rainn.org. To report content directly to US authorities, email HSIVenturaICAC@hsi.dhs.gov.

Internationally: UN Women at unwomen.org and The Pixel Project at thepixelproject.net maintain directories of agencies by country.

In the Netherlands: Offlimits is the abuse reporting bureau and was instrumental in this takedown: offlimits.nl

Subscribe to and amplify the journalists.

Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, Niamh Kennedy, and Eleanor Stubbs at CNN. Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh in Germany. NOS and Nieuwsuur in the Netherlands. The Substack writers covering this beat in depth:

The Motherland by Daphne Delvaux: themamattorney.substack.com

Objection: objectioneverything.substack.com

Subscribe. Share. Pay for journalism when you can. Survivor-aligned investigative reporting is what moved this from a quiet horror to a global takedown.

Name the next site when it appears.

Because it will. Watch for the mirror, the lookalike domain, the migrated server. Lookalike Motherless URLs with slight variations have already been reported. When you see them, report them.

Report to Google Search: support.google.com/websearch/answer/9116649

Report to hosting providers when you can identify them. Report to your representatives.

Keep speaking.

The cultural pressure that took Motherless down is the same cultural pressure that will take down the next site, and the one after that. Speak at your kitchen table. Speak in your circle. Speak to the men in your life. Speak in your comment sections. Silence is what the architecture wants from you.

Keep your eyes open.

Do not look away from the discomfort of seeing what is happening. The architecture relies on our refusal to look. The moment we look, in numbers, in coordination, in sustained attention, the architecture starts to crack. Looking is itself a political act.

Tend your altar.

This is the long work. The wave that took down this site has been building for years. Your candle, your circle, your refusals, your sustained attention — these are not separate from the political work. They are the body of it.

The Mother is rising. The architecture is being interrupted, one node at a time. The shadow is still doing its work, and we are still doing ours.

Both are true.

Keep going, my loves. We have only just begun.

In love and devotion
Elayne Kalila

If you have not yet read the Mother’s Day piece I published a couple days ago, Unmothered, it sits alongside this one as a deepening of the same conversation — the personal, the collective, and the architectural at once.

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Three weeks ago, I wrote about what happens when a world forgets the Mother. That piece went out, and something moved. The work of journalists and survivors gained momentum, and so did the outrage and the deep heart of so many of us who shared, who refused to look away. And on Friday, the website that had taken the Mother’s name in mockery was finally taken offline.

But that website was only ever a symptom.

The deeper unmothering, the one I have been trying to name in my own body for decades, is subtler and more pervasive than that. It is the architecture of a world that has forgotten how to value the Mother, how to see her, how to reverence what she carries.

So today, on the day the world is meant to celebrate her, I want to go deeper into what has actually been missing. Not only as a moment, but as the quiet ten-thousand-year erasure of an archetype, an energy, a way of being human that we have all been starved of.

What has actually been missing

Let me say this carefully, because it is easy to misread.

The Mother, as archetype, as energy, as the central principle of life-giving and life-sustaining care, has been systematically erased from our collective consciousness for thousands of years.

This is not to diminish the millions of women, men, and people of every gender who have been mothering. The nurses. The teachers. The aunts. The godmothers. The carers. The grandmothers. The fathers who father. The partners who tend. The friends who show up at three in the morning. These people exist. Their work is real. They have kept the Mother alive in the world, in their bodies, in their devotion.

What has been erased is not them. It is her.

The role. The function. The archetype. The sacred principle that says: I receive you exactly as you are. I feed you. I tend you. I do not ask you to earn my love. I stay with you through the becoming. I refuse the chain of harm. I know the body is sacred. I know that care is holy.

In our world, this work sits at the bottom of the hierarchy. The carers are paid the least. The teachers of the young are valued far below those who trade in money or power. While the doctor sits at the upper end of the pyramid, the nurse who tends the patient through the night sits far below.

This is what unmothered means, on a collective level. Not that there is no one mothering. But that the Mother is not respected. The Mother is not revered. The Mother is not valued. Her work is not seen as essential, even though it is the most essential work there is.

And this has cost us everything.

For thousands of years we have been living in a world that does not know how to receive. That does not know how to tend. That does not know how to value the one who gives without asking for return. We feel it in our bodies. In our nervous systems. In the way we move through the world, braced against abandonment, starved for unconditional regard, unsure whether we are lovable exactly as we are.

This is the erasure I have been writing into. Not only the website. The architecture itself.

I know this in my own body, because I have lived it.

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My heart is tender and soft as I write this

It is Mother’s Day, and the morning has arrived with that particular quietness it has for me. The light is soft through the kitchen window. The kettle is on. There is a candle lit at my altar, where I lit it before I sat down to write.

I want to invite you into my heart with me, because Mother’s Day is a tender one for me, and because the wider story of the Mother’s erasure has been written into my own life.

My mum was sick my whole life. And her whole life. She had been ill from the time she was a young woman. By the time I arrived, she was already in a body that had been ravaged by illness. The longer story is hers, and is mine, and belongs to the memoir I am slowly writing. It is not for today.

What I will say today is this. She wanted me desperately. I was the girl she had dreamed of. And she could not, for reasons that were never her fault, give me the mothering she most wanted to give, or the mothering I most needed to receive.

That was the biggest heartbreak of her life. And the biggest of mine.

But here is the thing I have come to understand, sitting with this for years. Her inability to mother me was not separate from the world’s inability to mother her. She was a woman who had spent her life inside a medical system that knew how to address her body but had no language for her heart. They knew how to treat the illness. They did not know how to meet the woman inside the illness. Her broken heart. Her broken nervous system. Her deepest fears. The grief tucked away that had no language. All of that remained unseen. Unmet. Unmothered.

And the deepest wound of all is that she was never quite able to fully step into being a mother herself, even though she yearned to.

That is the heartbreak of our relationship.

And I, inheriting that wound, spent my entire life looking for the Mother. In temples. In teachings. In the bodies of older women. In my own slow body. In the earth.

She died in 2019.

And here is the strange tender thing, which I did not expect. I am only now, six years on, beginning to know her. The memoir is becoming the vessel through which I am finally meeting my mum. The girl she had been before her body changed. The grief tucked away that had no language. The dreams she did not get to live. The woman underneath the wound who was never quite able to fully arrive in the room with me.

I am meeting her now, on the page, in a way I never could when she was alive.

The body of the writing has become the body of the reaching.

The dead can be met in ways the living sometimes cannot, it turns out. I did not know that until I started this work.

What this day used to feel like

I used to dread Mother’s Day.

It wasn’t because I didn’t love my mum. I did, and do. The love did not stop when she died, and I am not sure it gets to. The love simply moved.

But this day of celebration of the Mother has always been a bit crunchy for me. It is all about celebrating the ideal, present, available, attentive, capable of being celebrated with brunches and bouquets. And my mum could not be celebrated in those ways. And I could not either, because I never had children. So the day arrived, every year, carrying a double absence I did not quite know how to hold.

I would scroll the feeds. The brunches. The mothers and daughters laughing in matching sundresses. The children handing flowers. The fathers cooking pancakes. And I would feel, in my body, the particular kind of invisibility this day produces in women like me. Not belonging to the celebration. Not belonging to the club.

I want to be honest with you. It used to hurt.

And then, slowly, almost without my noticing, something began to change.

The first messages

It started with the godchildren.

When my friends began having babies, I was there, and I mean quite literally there. In the room. Holding my beloved sisters as they laboured through the long hours when the world narrows down to the next contraction, the next breath, the slow ancient sacred work of bringing a soul through. I had the great honour of being present at the births of these babies, which changed me forever.

So when I became godmother, several times over, it was not from the outside. It was from inside the threshold itself. And that kind of bond is a particular kind of bond, a deep privilege, which begins right when they take their first breath.

I held them at their christenings. I sent them birthday cards. I showed up to school plays. I held them when they were sad. I taught them the small practices that godmothers teach, about altars and candles and the quiet ways of being in the world.

I did not think of myself as their mother. They had mothers, beautiful ones, my friends, the women I loved. I was simply a presence. An aunt figure. A second adult who took them seriously. A woman who showed up.

Then they started growing up. And one Mother’s Day, when one of them was about eleven or twelve, a message arrived on my phone.

Happy Mother’s Day, Auntie Lani. You are like a second mum to me.

I sat down on the kitchen floor and wept.

It wasn’t so much that I felt validated. It was something else. I felt seen. Seen for what I had actually been doing all those years without naming it. Seen by the small person who had been on the receiving end of it, who had decided, in her own body, that what she had received from me was a form of mothering.

The messages have kept arriving every year since. And alongside them, over the years, the messages from the women in my temple. From the priestesses I have trained. You have mothered me. You have been a mother to my soul. I would not be the woman I am without you.

These messages have done more to heal my heart than the senders could possibly know.

Because what they showed me, slowly, year after year, is that I have been mothering all along. That my role in this lifetime, whatever the long story of why, was not to bear children. But it was, and is, to mother.

And I am not the only one.

On the longer story

I want to say something briefly about the longer story, because it sits underneath this piece.

I never fell pregnant when I was younger. I assumed, for most of my life, that I simply was not able to. It was only much later, in my forties, that I conceived for the first time, and lost that pregnancy, and realised, in the wake of that loss, that having a child had been an option all along. And by then, as these things often are, it was too late.

I am not going to unpack the rest of that story here. It belongs to the memoir.

But I want to name it, because I know I am not the only woman reading who is carrying some version of that story. The woman who tried and could not. The woman who waited and ran out of time. The woman who chose not to and still grieves the choice. The woman who lost a pregnancy. The woman who was never partnered in the way that would have made it possible. The woman whose body said no for reasons she will never fully understand. The woman who is forty-five or fifty-two or sixty-three and is still, on Mother’s Day, wondering whether she is allowed to feel what she feels.

You are allowed.

And you have been mothering, whether you know it yet or not.

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We all mother

We all mother. All of us. Regardless of whether we bore children. Regardless of whether we partnered. Regardless of whether our own mothers reached us or could not. Regardless of gender, regardless of biology, regardless of what the Hallmark cards say. And this is not to eclipse those who are doing the incredibly hard work of mothering and parenting their birth children, please dont hear me wrong, I see you and honor you so deeply.

And here is how I see the Mother returning to us…

The teacher mothers. The aunt mothers. The godmother mothers. The midwife mothers. The therapist mothers. The eldest daughter, who was forced into mothering before she should have been, mothers. The friend who shows up at three in the morning mothers. The neighbour who cooks the meal when someone is grieving mothers. The priestess mothers. The witch mothers. The hospice nurse mothers. The trans woman who has chosen the feminine path and tends every soul who comes through her door mothers.

We mother our friends. We mother our students. We mother our partners, sometimes, when they were not mothered enough. We mother our own younger selves, the small girls in us who are still waiting for someone to come and reach them. We mother the world, when the world cannot mother itself.

And the women who did bear children, who showed up for the thousand small daily labours of feeding, holding, witnessing, surviving the exhaustion of it, you have done one of the holiest things a body can do, and I bow to you today. Today is yours, fully and rightly.

But it is also ours. The mothers who have been mothering without the title. The women who held the children who were not theirs. The women who held each other. The women who held themselves when no one else would.

Today is for all of us.

What the Mother is

Because we have been so long without her, I want to name her. As a felt presence. As the qualities that live in a body when the Mother is in it.

• The Mother is the one who receives. Who looks at what is in front of her and does not flinch. Does not try to fix it before she has met it. Does not require it to be different in order to love it. The Mother is the principle of unconditional receiving, which is the rarest frequency on the planet right now, and the one we are most starved of.

• The Mother is the one who feeds. The soup. The breast. The held hand. The place to sleep. The honest answer. The piece of bread and the cup of tea. She is concrete, specific, embodied, and she does not ask anyone to earn what she offers.

• The Mother is the one who tells the truth. Gently, mostly, but truthfully. She does not flatter. She does not lie. She does not collude in the avoidance of what is actually happening. The world we are inside has been so starved of truthful mothering that most of us cannot tell the difference, anymore, between honest love and managed niceness.

• The Mother is the one who holds the line. She is soft and hard, both, in service of life. She will tell you no when no is what you need to hear. She will let you fall down when falling down is what your becoming requires. She will not rescue you from the lessons you have to learn, and she will not abandon you while you are learning them.

• The Mother is the one who knows time differently. She moves at the speed of growing things. She does not rush the fruit on the tree. She does not pull the seedling out to check whether it is doing what it should be doing. She trusts the unfolding, and she trusts that her presence is what the unfolding most needs.

• The Mother is the one who knows the body is sacred. Her own. Yours. The earth’s. She does not split the holy from the physical, the spiritual from the embodied. She has been so thoroughly driven out of the cosmology of the West, where holiness was relocated to a disembodied heaven, that we are still learning, slowly, painfully, that the Mother and the body are the same thing.

• The Mother is the one who refuses the chain of harm. She will not hand on what was done to her. She will absorb the cost of breaking the pattern in her own body, so the next generation does not have to. The Mother is the principle that says, this stops with me.

These are the qualities the world has been starved of. These are the qualities we have been calling home, every one of us, in every act of mothering we have ever done.

When you mother the friend who is grieving, you are calling her home.

When you tell the truth, gently, to someone who needed to hear it, you are calling her home.

When you refuse the chain of harm in your own body, you are calling her home.

When you receive someone exactly as they are, without flinching, without fixing, you are calling her home.

You are how she returns.

And the Mother who is rising

The Mother is rising. I know this in my bones.

She has been in exile for ten thousand years. She has been mocked by the men who used her name to label their pornography. She has been driven out of the public imagination of the West, her temples torn down, her priestesses burned, her midwives criminalised, her wisdom rebranded as superstition.

And still she has not stopped. Still she has lived in the bodies of women who refused to forget her. Still she has been carried, in the candles lit on Sunday mornings, in the soup made for the friend in grief, in the daughter held while the mother was dying, in the godchild’s message on Mother’s Day, in the priestess teaching her sisters that they are sacred.

She has been here all along. We have been calling her home, every one of us, with every act of mothering we have ever done.

Today, I am asking you to name her out loud.

What to do today

• If you have a mother who reached you, call her. Tell her exactly what she gave you, in specific language. You made me feel safe. You taught me to love books. You showed me what tenderness looked like.

• If you have a mother who could not reach you, light a candle anyway. Speak to her in your body. I see you. I see what you could not give me. I see what you carried that made it impossible. I love you anyway. If she is still alive, call if you can. If you cannot, do not force it. The honouring is in your body, not in the phone call.

• If your mother has died, light a candle. Tell her something you wish you had said. Or sit in silence. Both are real. And know, from a daughter still meeting her own mum years after she died, that the meeting is possible. The relationship is not over. It simply moves into a different chamber.

• If you mothered, in any of the forms I have named, let yourself feel today. Receive what you have actually given. It is a holy thing.

• If you are grieving, a mother, a child, a child you wanted, a child you lost, a mothering that was never offered, let yourself grieve today. Mother’s Day is not only the celebration. It is also the wound. Both belong here.

• If you are a priestess, a teacher, a sister, a friend, a witch, an aunt, a godmother, a midwife, a therapist, a healer, light a candle and name the women you have mothered. Name them out loud. Bless them.

And if you can, name the Mother out loud. The Great Mother. The one we have been calling home for so many years. The one whose return is not finished, and whose return is happening. Speak to her. Tell her you remember.

She is here.

She has always been here.

She lives in every act of mothering we have ever done, named or unnamed, biological or chosen, witnessed or invisible.

Today, my loves, we honour her.

Happy Mother’s Day, in every form it takes for you.

I love you. I see you. I am with you.

The Mother is rising. And we are the ones bringing her home.

In memory of my mum Margaret Anne Bourne

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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UPDATE: for resources on next steps please see this article

I sat down at my desk this morning and my inbox was full of women and men sending me the same news.

Motherless dot com, the site I wrote about in What Happens When the World Is Motherless three weeks ago, has been taken offline by Dutch authorities.

Prosecutors in Zeeland-West-Braband have opened a preliminary investigation. The servers, hosted by NFOrce Internet Services in the south of the Netherlands, were forced to comply within twelve hours. The site is gone. As of last night.

Lets feel this one together.

The site is gone.

The site that sat at the top of the search results for what does the worst of the masculine wound produce when it is left unattended for ten thousand years, the site with the eighty-two million visitors in March, the site with the eyecheck tag and the Telegram groups and the drugged wives, has been taken down by a sovereign government. Because enough of us, in enough places, refused to let it stay up.

This is what we are going to talk about today. Because I want every woman who shared Motherless, every man who took it to his men’s group, every reader who wailed on the floor and then sent it to three more people, to know what your fire did.

Your fire did this. Your fire, alongside the fires of many others, did this.

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Who moved this

I want to name, clearly, who did the work to make this happen. Because the win belongs to many,.

The journalists. Saskya Vandoorne and her team at CNN, who broke the original investigation in late March 2026. Isabell Beer in Germany, whose reporting on the same network of platforms began the international scrutiny. Isabel Ströh, who has been documenting the German Telegram networks for months. The Dutch broadcasters NOS and Nieuwsuur, whose local reporting in the wake of CNN’s investigation finally moved Dutch authorities to act. These journalists did the dangerous, painstaking, body-shaking work of looking directly at content most of us cannot bear to know exists, and turning what they saw into evidence the rest of us could carry.

The survivors. Zoe Watts, a British survivor of intimate partner drug-facilitated sexual assault, and Amanda Stanhope, who have just launched the #EndEyeCheck campaign. They named the wound after the very mechanism the men were using to confirm her unconsciousness, eyecheck, the tag they would post to prove she could not see them.

The survivors took the wound and turned it into a public reckoning. That is the alchemy of the true healing They are the women whose bodies carried this and who decided, against everything that would have been easier, to stand up and use what happened to them to protect the next woman. Find them. Follow them. Share their work. They are the ones who made this real.

The advocacy organisations. Robbert Hoving and Offlimits in the Netherlands, who pressured Dutch regulators publicly. The dozens of women’s organisations in Europe, the UK, Canada, Germany, who amplified the reporting. The grassroots networks that turned a story into a movement.

And you. The readers. The women and men who read Motherless and refused to scroll past. Who sent it to the men in your lives. Who took it to your circles. Who wrote to your representatives. Who shared it with such force that within forty-eight hours of publication it was being read in twenty-six countries. The cultural pressure that comes from a wave of women refusing to perform okayness any longer is one of the most powerful political forces on this earth. You are part of why this happened.

I want to say this clearly, my loves. Our voices moved this. Not alone. With many others. But yes. Our voices were part of the wave that took this site down. The energy is real. The fire is real. The pulse is real.

What this confirms

I want to say something I have been holding in my body for a long time, and that the news this morning has confirmed.

Our work works.

The prayer at the altar works. The piece written through tears at the kitchen table works. The forwarding of an article to three women you know works. The men’s circle reading the piece together works. The conversation at the dinner table works. The naming of the wound out loud works.

It does not always work fast. It does not always work in ways we can measure. Sometimes it works underground for years before it surfaces. But the energy is not nothing. The fire is not theatre. The collective body of women who refuse to look away, and then men who stand with them has weight, and that weight moves things.

A little less than three weeks ago I sat at my altar with tears running down my face and wrote a piece about a website I had only just learned existed. I sent it out into the world with no expectation of where it would go. It went further than I imagined possible. And it landed in the inboxes of people who were already moving, the journalists already investigating, the survivors already organising, the regulators already considering, and added to the pressure that finally forced the issue.

That is how this works. Not one person. Not one piece. A wave. A wave of bodies, voices, prayers, articles, posts, conversations, refusals, that finally crests in the place where it must.

The tide is turning.

We are the wave. All of us. Together. And the wave just took down a site that should never have been allowed to exist.

Take a breath, my loves. Let your body register this. We did something.

What comes next

The regulators have warned, rightly, that the site can come back. The Coco platform that Dominique Pelicot used to recruit more than seventy men to rape his ex-wife Gisèle was taken down, and a similar site, Cocoland.cc, has just resurfaced with its domain registered in the Coco Islands. Motherless can do the same. The men who used the site are still out there. The Telegram groups are still active. The wider ecosystem of drug-facilitated sexual assault has not been dismantled by one takedown.

So we do not rest. We celebrate the win, we honour the survivors, and we keep going.

Here is what to do this week, my loves.

• Follow Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope. Share the #EndEyeCheck campaign. Their work is far from finished, and it is exactly the kind of survivor-led organising that produces the next victory.

• Follow the journalists. Saskya Vandoorne. Isabell Beer. Isabel Ströh. Their reporting is the engine. Subscribe, share, support.

• Pressure your representatives. The takedown happened in the Netherlands because Dutch citizens and journalists pressed their authorities. Your country has its own version of NFOrce, its own version of the regulators who have been looking the other way. Find them. Name them. Pressure them.

• Keep talking about it. At your kitchen table. In your circle. With the men in your life. The cultural pressure that took Motherless down is the same cultural pressure that will take down the next site, and the one after that. Do not let the conversation die because the visible target is gone.

• And tend your altar. Tonight. Light a candle. Name the survivors. Name the journalists. Name the women who threw their phones across the room three weeks ago and the men who took the article to their circles. Name the wave. Name what you did. Name what you will keep doing.

We are not in the end zone. We are in a moment of confirmation. The work moves things. Our voices matter. Our hearts make a difference.

The pulse is real, my loves.

Light another fire tonight. We have only just started.

In love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

Before I tell you about Beltane, I have to tell you about my father.

My father was a Morris man. Which means that on the first of May, every year of my childhood, he would get up before dawn, put on the white clothes, and go out into the cold English morning to meet the other Morris men at the top of the hill, and they would dance the sun up.

I went with him sometimes. A small girl in the dark, half asleep, watching him lift the harmonium out of the back of the car and set it up on the wet grass while the men with bells on their legs gathered round him in the half-light. And then he would play. And they would sing. The old folk songs. The May Day songs. Songs my body knew before my mind did. Songs that had been sung at this hour, on this hill, on this morning, for longer than anyone could remember.

That is how I was raised.

Beltane is not an idea I came to in a book about pagan revival. Beltane is my father in white at dawn, with his hands on the harmonium and the old songs coming out of his throat into the cold morning air. It is the smell of dewy grass through the soles of small feet. It is the bells on the dancers’ legs. It is the moment the first edge of the sun came up over the hill and the men danced harder, because that was the whole point. They were dancing the sun in.

I have written, in Fatherless, that I was not well-fathered. That I raised myself from fifteen on. That I know the wound of the absent father in my own body. All of that is true.

And.

This was the thing he gave me. He could not father me in the ways I most needed. But he handed me this. The living thread of an ancient masculine tradition that had survived four hundred years of Puritan suppression and was still being carried, before sunrise, on a hill in the English countryside, by men who got up to dance the year into being.

He passed me the Beltane fire. And it has stayed.

So when I write to you today about this High Holy Day, I am writing from inside something that has been running through my body since I was small.

This is my personal holy day. And this morning, sitting at my altar with my tea, the fires of last night still warm somewhere in the back of my body, I am writing to you because something has happened in the last week that I have to tell you about.

A man wrote to me.

I have been receiving letters from men in numbers I genuinely did not expect after Motherless and Fatherless went out into the world. Beautiful, bone-honest letters. Men telling me they have not stopped thinking about the pieces. Men telling me they took them to their men’s groups. Men telling me they cried in a way they had not cried since their fathers died.

But this letter did something else.

He said, and I am paraphrasing because the letter is private, that he thought it was time. Time for the men and the women to come together. Into a shared space. To look at each other. To begin the conversation our species has not yet been able to hold without it collapsing into the same old pattern.

And I felt my whole body answer.

Yes.

And…

That and is what this whole piece is about. That and is the entire teaching of Beltane, and the entire reason the ancients lit two fires and not one, and the entire reason the May Queen and the Green Man do not meet in the village square but in the consecrated ground, after the fires have done their work, in the ritual the whole community has prepared for.

Yes, my love. Yes, beloveds. Yes to the men beginning to ask. Yes to the longing in all of us for a different ending to this story.

And…

Not yet collapsed into, not rushed, not patched-up survivors of the same wound finding each other in the dark and calling it union. Not the unreckoned masculine reaching for the rising feminine and pulling her back down into the same pattern she has spent everything to climb out of.

Sacred Marriage is not the relief of two exhausted people leaning on each other. Sacred Marriage is what happens when two whole human beings, each with their own ground beneath them, meet in the consecrated field and weave something neither one of them could weave alone.

That is what Beltane is for. That is what the maypole is. That is what the fires are. And that is, I believe with my whole body, what we are being asked to remember right now.

Let me share with you what the day actually is, and you will see why it matters.

What Beltane actually is

Beltane is one of the eight great holy days of the Celtic year. The cross-quarter days. The hinges. Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain. Older than Christianity. Older than Rome. The rhythm of a people who lived close enough to the earth to know what the earth was doing, and to mark it with fire and circle and song.

Beltane sits exactly halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The threshold of summer. The day the cattle were driven up to the high pastures. The day the maypole went up in the village green. The day the young men and women went into the greenwood together, and did not come home until morning, and what happened there was not shame but sacrament.

The name comes from the Gaelic Bealtaine, traced to the bright fires, or possibly the fires of Belenus, an old Celtic god of the sun. The word holds the heat of the season turning. The earth in full yes.

The central rite was fire. Two great bonfires built side by side, the cattle driven between them, the people walking through and leaping over them. Embers carried back to relight home hearths that had been ritually extinguished, so every fire in the village would be lit fresh from one great central source. That is what a sacred culture looks like.

And in the middle of the village green, the maypole went up.

The maypole is one of the oldest images we have of the Sacred Marriage. A tree freshly cut, stripped of all but its highest branches, raised tall in the centre of the gathering ground. Then the ribbons. The flowers. The dancers, women and men together, moving in opposite circles, weaving patterns that took the whole day to complete.

The pole is the masculine. The Green Man rising. The vertical axis. The dance and the ribbons are the feminine. The May Queen blooming. Movement and pattern wrapping the standing thing. Together they make a single woven image of two principles that need each other to be what they are.

And then, with the fires lit and the maypole woven, the young men and women went into the woods.

The sexual rites of Beltane were a living prayer. The body-to-body union of the young in the greenwood was understood as direct participation in the fertility of the land. When the human couple lay down on the earth and joined, the land itself was being blessed. This is the oldest theology of sex on the planet — human union as the visible echo of the cosmic union that turns the wheel of the year.

When the church came in, it did not understand this, or perhaps more accurately, understood it perfectly and decided to crush it. The maypoles were torn down. The Puritans outlawed them in 1644. Sex became sin. The body became shame. The Sacred Marriage was driven out of public life and into the secret schools and the bodies of the women who refused to forget.

We are still living inside that suppression. And we are, finally, coming out the other side of it.

Masculine and Feminine Principles

Before I introduce you to them, I have to say something clearly, because it shapes everything that follows.

The Green Man and the May Queen are not men and women. They are not a simply biological pair. They are archetypal frequencies, the masculine and feminine principles that live within every human being, regardless of body, regardless of identity, regardless of who we love.

What the alchemists called Sol and Luna. What the Tantrikas call Shiva and Shakti. What the Taoists called Yang and Yin. The vertical, rooted, standing principle. And the flowing, weaving, blooming one. Every soul is woven of both. Every body, of any configuration, carries both.

The Sacred Marriage is the inner union of these two principles within every human being, and the outer meeting of whole humans who have done enough of that inner work to meet each other in the consecrated field. The trans woman becoming the Queen in her own body. The trans man reclaiming the Green Man in himself. The non-binary soul weaving the inner Maypole within. The cisgender woman and man doing the same descent in their own forms. The medicine is the same. The work is the same. The Whole has no exclusions.

So when I write, in what follows, about these two meeting, I am writing about a meeting that happens at every layer. Within the soul. Between souls. Across the cosmos.

The Green Man and the May Queen

The Green Man is one of the most ancient images of the masculine in the European imagination. The foliate head. The face peering out of the leaves. The Lord of the Greenwood. You can find him carved into the stones of churches across Europe, even churches built deep inside the centuries when his worship was forbidden. The masons who built those churches were the heirs of an older tradition, and they would not let him be erased. So they hid him in the corbels and the ceiling bosses. A leaf-covered face peering down at the congregation. A reminder. A refusal.

He is the masculine in its noble form. Knowing itself as part of the earth, not above it. Growing upward like a tree, with roots as deep as its branches are high. Dying in autumn and coming back in spring. Fundamentally in service to life.

His ancestors are everywhere. Cernunnos, the antlered Celtic lord. Pan in every Greek wood. Dionysus. Osiris, dismembered and reassembled by the love of the goddess. The horned god of every shamanic tradition who knows the way between the worlds because he has died and come back. Yes, even Jesus carries the frequency of the Green man.

The May Queen is his counterpart, his beloved, his match. The feminine in her flowering. The earth in full bloom. The maiden who has stepped into her power, the woman whose body is the visible signal of the season’s yes. Crowned with flowers. Dressed in white and green. Carried through the village in procession.

She is Inanna in her radiance. Aphrodite arriving on the shore. Brigid in her flowering aspect. The Shulamite in the Song of Songs, dark and beautiful and unashamed and going out, deliberately, to find her lover.

And on Beltane, these two meet.

Not as a man and a woman in a transactional encounter, but as two divine principles, recognising each other across the consecrated ground, and choosing to meet. The Green Man does not take the May Queen. He honours her. The May Queen does not bow to the Green Man. She receives him. His strength serves her flowering. Her body meets his standing. They make this together, or they make nothing.

That is the Sacred Marriage. The hieros gamos. The central rite of every mystery school the human species has ever built. And it is what we are being asked to remember

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What We Have Been Living Without

I wrote, in Motherless, about what happens when the feminine is exiled from the cosmos for ten thousand years. I wrote, in Fatherless, about what happens when the noble masculine is shot in a field and replaced with the corpse of a soldier. Those two pieces tell, between them, the diagnosis of what we are inside.

This third piece is about what happens when both have been exiled. Because what is most thoroughly destroyed is not either of them alone. It is the relationship between them.

Let me, once again, share with you what I feel we have been living without.

On the personal level.

• It means you have never seen, in your own life, two whole human beings meeting each other in their full sovereign aliveness, weaving something together that neither one could weave alone.

• It means you have not yet felt, in your own body, what it is to be loved by someone who has done their own descent and arrived at you on their own ground, not leaning, not collapsing, not asking you to be smaller so they can stay upright.

• It means the closest you have come to Sacred Marriage might have been a moment in a forest, a song in your headphones, a half-second of recognition with a stranger across a room — a glimpse, and then gone, and you did not have the cosmology to know what you had glimpsed.

On the relational level.

• It means most of the marriages around you are held together by the children, by the mortgage, by the fear of being alone, by the slow accommodation of two people who never quite met each other in the first place.

• It means most of the sex you have had, even the loving kind, has carried somewhere inside it the unreckoned weight of one person bringing more presence than the other, and the conscious one quietly absorbing the cost.

• It means you have watched friends marry their wounds rather than their partners, and you have done it yourself at least once, and you only recognised it years later, after the unwinding.

• It means there are conversations you have wanted to have with the man you love for ten years, and you have not had them, because the consecrated ground for them does not yet exist between you.

On the cultural level.

• It means we have no public ritual for the meeting of two whole humans. We have weddings, which are property exchanges in nicer clothes. We have ceremonies, which are mostly performance. The Sacred Marriage, the actual rite, has not been performed at scale on this earth for at least a thousand years.

• It means our culture confuses sex with intimacy, intimacy with attachment, and attachment with love, and most people will live their whole lives without knowing the difference.

• It means we have built whole industries on the failure of partnership — the divorce industry, the dating apps, the relationship coaching economy — and almost none of them are pointing at the actual missing thing, which is the cosmology that would make real partnership possible.

• It means the children are watching all of this. They are growing up inside our forgeries of the Sacred Marriage, and they are learning what they think love is from what we have been able to manage, which is not much.

On the archetypal level.

• It means the hieros gamos, the central rite of every mystery school the human species has ever built, has been driven out of public life for a thousand years.

• It means the maypole was torn down, the May Queen was demonised as a whore, the Green Man was carved into the corbels of the cathedrals because he could not be allowed in the open, and we are the descendants of that suppression.

• It means the wedding image at the heart of the Song of Songs, of the Sufi poetry, of the alchemical texts, has been reduced in the mainstream imagination to either a religious ceremony or a romantic comedy, when it was always pointing at something cosmological.

• It means we have inherited a story in which the divine pair has been ripped apart and we are not sure they were ever real.

On the spiritual level.

• It means we do not know how to descend together. We do not know how to grieve together. We do not know how to be initiated together, which is what real partnership actually is.

• It means the body has not been allowed to be sacred, and so the union of bodies has not been allowed to be sacred either, and so the union of souls cannot find ground to land on.

• It means we have lost the cosmology in which the meeting of two whole humans is itself a participation in the turning of the world.

• It means we have been trying to do the Sacred Marriage with the cosmology of the marketplace, and wondering why it does not work.

• That is what we have been living without. That is the air we have all been breathing. Forgeries everywhere we look. The real thing nowhere we have been taught to see.

This is what happens to a species that has lost its central rite.

But, my loves. Listen.

Some of us are remembering. Right now. The man who wrote to me this week is part of that. The thousands of women writing after Motherless. The men writing after Fatherless. The boys in the men’s circles. The girls in priestess training. The Green Man is waking up in the forests of the men. The May Queen is rising in the bodies of the women. The fires are being lit again.

And the question of this moment is whether we can hold the holiness of what is being asked.

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To the Man Who Wrote to Me

You know who you are. And if you are reading this, I want to answer you publicly, because I think the answer is for all of us.

Yes.

Yes, it is time. Yes, the men and the women have to come together. Yes, the next phase of this work cannot be done by either of us alone. The longing in your letter is a longing I share, and my whole body answered the moment I read your words.

And.

Not before, not yet, not the way we have done it every other time we have tried to do this and watched it fail.

I am going to be specific.

What I am not available for, and what I do not believe any of the women doing this work are available for, is being summoned into a shared space before we have each tended what is ours to tend. I am not available to be the woman who closes the gap that was made by your absence from your own work. I am not available to soften my voice so that men who have not done their grief can sit comfortably in a circle with women who have. I am not available to slow my own becoming, so that the speed of return is determined by whoever in the room is moving slowest.

This is not because I do not love you. It is because I love you exactly, fiercely, accurately, and the version of you I am in love with is the one who has done the work. The Green Man. Not the patched-up patriarch in better clothing.

What I am available for is the conscious meeting that happens after both have done enough of their own descent to arrive at the consecrated ground as sovereign beings. Not as the wounded reaching for the wounded. As the reckoned reaching for the reckoned.

For the men, that means the work I named in Fatherless. The grieving of the unfathered. The meeting of the wounded boy. The descent into your own shadow. The finding of your circle. The reclaiming of your voice. The willingness to be witnessed by another whole human being and not disappear.

For the women, that means the work we have been doing for years. The reckoning. The release. The body. The unknown. The self-devotion. The Inanna descent that strips us of every layer until we know what we are without anyone’s permission.

This is not a checklist that gets completed. This is a lifetime of practice. But there is a threshold inside it. A moment at which a man can be present in a room with a fully embodied woman without armouring or collapsing or projecting. And a moment at which a woman can be present in a room with a fully embodied man without making herself smaller or scanning for danger or losing her own thread.

That threshold is the consecrated ground. That threshold is the maypole. That threshold is where the Green Man and the May Queen actually meet.

We are closer to it than we have been in three thousand years. We are not yet there.

So my answer to you, beloved man, is this. Yes. I will meet you there. You go and do your work. I will continue mine. And when we have done enough of it, on whichever Beltane that turns out to be, we will find each other in the consecrated field, and we will weave something neither of us can weave alone.

Until then, I bless your descent. I bless your circle. I bless the elders you are seeking and the boys you are blessing and the silence you are finally breaking in the rooms where your brothers have been silent for too long.

I am not far away. I am rising in my own body, on my own ground. And the Sacred Marriage is closer with every breath we both take toward our own becoming.

What This Beltane is Asking

So here we are. The fires are lit. The maypole is woven. The veil between the worlds is thin in the way the wheel of the year only allows it to be at this particular hinge.

For the women in this circle: do not abandon your descent for the lure of premature reunion. The maypole does not rise from a barren field. The May Queen does not crown a man who has not yet stood for himself. We have done that. For three thousand years we have been the women who closed the gap, who softened our voices, who absorbed what should have been absorbed by elders and circles and the man’s own work. And it has produced the world we are now inside.

Do not do it again. Stay with your reckoning. Bloom only when you have done what is yours to do, and only with men who have done what is theirs.

For the men reading this: become the Green Man. Not by performing it. By doing the work I named in Fatherless. Meet the wounded boy. Grieve the father you did not have. Find your circle. Descend into your own shadow. Reclaim your voice. Learn to be witnessed. The women you love, the daughters who are watching you, the sons who are learning from you, are waiting.

For all of us, women and men and every soul on the spectrum that the binary cannot hold: light a fire tonight. Even a candle. Even a match. Stand with the fire and say the names. Bealtaine. Beltane. May Day. The High Holy Day of the Sacred Marriage.

And then say the prayer. From your own body. Something like:

May the Green Man rise.

May the May Queen bloom.

May they meet, this time, in reverence.

May the land flourish again.

And then go on with your day, knowing that you have done a small piece of the oldest medicine on the planet, and that you have done it on the day the medicine was meant to be done.

The Pulse Is Real

I am ending this where I ended Fatherless, because it is the truest thing I know.

The pulse is real.

The Mother is rising. The Father is rising. And rising alongside them, the relationship that has been driven underground for ten thousand years is beginning, in our bodies and our circles and our letters to each other, to remember itself.

I want to say something here that I have been holding back, because it is the truest thing I know about all of this.

We have never actually been severed.

The culture has been severed. The rite has been severed. The cosmology has been severed. The public memory of what we are has been severed. All of that is real, and the piece you have just read is the diagnosis of it.

But the Sacred Marriage itself cannot be severed. It is the architecture of being. It is the way the universe is built. The Green Man and the May Queen live in every body, every soul, every breath. The masculine and feminine principles have never stopped weaving each other into existence. They could not stop. The cosmos does not work without them.

What has been severed is our ability to see it. To name it. To gather around it. To practise it openly. To live inside the cosmology that knows what it is.

That is what we are recovering. Not the marriage itself. The marriage has been here all along. We are recovering the eyes that can see it. The voice that can name it. The fire that can hold space for it. The community that can witness it. The cosmology that can carry it.

We were never apart. We only forgot how to remember.

This Beltane, may we hold the holiness of what is being asked of us. May we not collapse the work for the comfort of premature union. May we tend the fire long enough that when we do come together, we come together as the gods of our own myths.

The Green Man rises. The May Queen blooms. The maypole goes up in the village green of every kitchen and bedroom and circle and forest where two whole people are learning to meet.

The Sacred Marriage is not behind us. It is not even ahead of us.

It is here. It has been here all along. Waiting for us to remember how to see it.

And the seeing begins, beloved, with this fire, lit tonight, on this old holy day, in this old world that is ready, at last, to remember what it has always carried.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

P.S. As I wrote in Motherless and Fatherless*, this medicine is for every soul. The trans women becoming the Queen in their own bodies. The trans men reclaiming the Green Man in theirs. The non-binary souls weaving the inner Maypole within. You are doing the deepest archetypal work there is. You belong inside this conversation. You have always belonged inside it. The return of the Whole has no exclusions. It cannot. That is the whole point.*

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When I finished What Happens When the World is Motherless and sent it out into the world, I thought I had written the piece.

I hadn’t.

Almost the moment it went live, something flashed into my awareness with a clarity I had not been expecting. A sudden visceral knowing that the piece I had just written was only half the story.

The world is not only motherless. It is fatherless too.

And you cannot bring the Mother home by herself. It is not that kind of restoration. The Mother and the Father have always belonged to each other. The severance of one is the severance of the other. You cannot mend half of a torn thing.

If the Mother has been in exile, the noble masculine has been missing right alongside her. He disappeared when she disappeared, exiled by the same patriarchal forces that pushed her aside. He has been absent for as long as she has been absent. And we cannot bring one home without the other.

So this is that piece.

Why I have to write this

A word to the women before I go any further. Because I can feel the risk that this piece could be misread, and I need to close the door on that misreading before it opens.

I am not writing Fatherless because I have gone soft on men.

I am writing it because the Mother cannot come home to a world that has not also called the noble masculine home. She will not be safe. She will not be revered. She will not be held in the dignity that is hers. She will be, exactly as she has been for the last few thousand years, met by a masculine that does not know how to honor her, because it has never been taught. And we will find ourselves in the same endless story we have been trying to break for generations.

This is the cycle we keep running inside.

We call the Mother home. We rise. We find our voices. We reclaim our bodies. We gather in circle. We become more ourselves than we have been in thousands of years.

And then we meet the men. And many of the men have not done their work, to heal from the ravages of patriarchy, and what it has robbed them of. And so the Mother in us, newly risen, is met by the same unconscious, unreckoned, untutored masculine that has never known what to do with her. And she is wounded again. And we go back into hiding. And the whole thing resets.

This has been the shape of it for thousands of years. I am writing Fatherless because I do not want to run this loop one more time.

The return of the Mother without the return of the Father is not the return of the Mother. It is only the first half of a motion that collapses back on itself if the second half never arrives.

That wall must come down. Not by us hammering at it from our side. By the men on the other side of it doing the reckoning that has been waiting for them for so very long.

I am writing to the men now, as fiercely as I have ever written to us. Not because I have gone soft. Because I have gone deeper. Our work and their work are one work, done in two directions. Neither half completes itself without the other.

The Mother rising without the Father rising is how we got here the last time. I am not doing it again.

And to the men reading

I want to turn to you now, briefly, before I go any further.

I know many of you are here. I know some of you wrote to me. I know some of you are standing quietly at the back, not sure yet if this is for you.

You are.

This is for you. Not as spectator. As participant. As the one I am writing toward.

What I am about to say is going to land hard in places. I am not going to soften it. I owe you more than that, and so do you. But I want you to know, before we go in, that I am writing from love. Fierce love. The kind that refuses to let you stay asleep in the counterfeit of yourself that patriarchy has been handing you for four thousand years.

You are not the problem. You are not the enemy. You are the one we have been waiting for, alongside us. The one whose return is inseparable from hers.

So stay. Read all the way through. The piece is for you as much as it is for any of us.

Let us begin.

What came back

The morning after Motherless went out, I lit the candles on my altar.

I had been reading the responses for hours. Tea going cold next to me. I was a bit shocked at the chord of resonance the piece had struck.

Women who had wailed and thrown their phones across the room. Women in shock and disgust. Women who said they did not know they had been carrying this their whole lives until they read it, and then they could not stop. Women saying they are ready to stand, to circle, to call the Mother home.

And then there were the men.

I was not expecting the men. Which goes to show the depth of the issue. I had gotten so used to my own internalised idea that men do not want to hear from us women about things like this.

When their messages came pouring in, I sat at my altar and I cried. I felt something I have not felt in a long time inside the slow flood of these months. The Epstein files. The legislation. Roe. The website. The children. The whole unreckoned machinery of it grinding forward in the ordinary news cycle of our mornings.

Men I have never met, writing from their kitchens and their desks. Men crying. Men furious with a clean, specific fury I recognised instantly as the noble masculine finally handed something to stand against. One man wrote, as a man, I do not tolerate this. Period. End of story. Another wrote that not since reading bell hooks’s The Will to Change has a piece of writing challenged me as a man so deeply.

I have been feeling so much these last months. I know you have too. But reading your messages, I started to feel the visceral sense that I am not alone.

And reading all of your messages, 1000’s of them, I could feel a pulse of goodness underneath the horror. The pulse of the desire in ordinary people to be more human with each other. The pulse of the yes that keeps rising even now, even inside this, even after everything..

And from that altar, with the candles lit and my face wet, this companion piece began to write itself.

A note on where I am writing from

If I am being honest with you, and I am, I know this wound in my own body. I was not well-fathered. I have raised myself from fifteen on. I am, decidedly, unparented.

I am not writing this from the warm middle of a well-fathered life, offering tidy wisdom about men to women who have been mauled. I am writing it from inside the same longing a lot of us are carrying. And still, I still love the men. I still believe in the noble masculine. And I want to tell you what I mean by that.

What patriarchy actually is

I want to name something that will land uncomfortably for some of us. I am going to name it anyway, because I think we are ready.

Patriarchy is not the masculine winning.

Patriarchy is the masculine broken.

Read that again if you need to. I had to, the first time I thought it.

For thousands of years we have lived inside a structure we call patriarchy. And we have, with quite good evidence, identified it as the source of most of what has gone catastrophically wrong on this planet. The wars. The extraction. The legislation of women’s bodies by men who have not earned the right to name a single one of our organs. The worship of force over tenderness. Dominance over relationship. Empire over earth.

All of that is real.

And the men are not patriarchy’s beneficiaries. They are its foot soldiers. Its casualties. Its orphans.

Patriarchy took the noble masculine out into a field somewhere about four thousand years ago and shot him. Then it put a uniform on the body and told every boy born since that this was what a man looked like.

That was never what a man looked like.

That was the corpse of one.

The noble masculine

Somewhere underneath all of it, there is an archetype that has been waiting a very long time to be named.

He is the protector, and the steward. The one who stands between the vulnerable and the harm. Whose strength is in the service of what he loves, rather than at the throat of what he fears.

He is the father who blesses, not the one who withholds. The one who sees his child and says yes. You. Exactly as you are. I am here. You are safe.

He is the lover who worships, but does not seek to own or posses. The one who kneels before the feminine because he recognises what she carries, and rises alongside her because his ground is different and his ground is also sacred.

He is the elder who holds. Who has sat with his own shadow long enough to no longer project it onto someone smaller. Who has grieved his own father’s absence, and chosen, consciously, not to recreate it.

He has been missing so long that most men alive today have no living memory of him. Their fathers did not embody him. Their fathers’ fathers did not embody him. Each generation has been handed a counterfeit and told it was the real thing.

Imagine being handed a counterfeit of yourself at birth, and spending your whole life trying to live up to something that was never you.

That is what has happened to men under patriarchy. And we are asking them to hear our rage about it.

[Image: The Green Man. Ancient figure of the noble masculine. Earliest cave representations from 25,000 BCE.]

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What a fatherless world actually feels like in the body

Let me tell you what fatherless means. The felt texture of it from inside my body. I am asking the men reading to linger here especially. This is not an indictment. This is a map of what has happened to you too.

On the personal level.

It means there has never been a man in your life whose shoulder you could lay your head on and feel the world go quiet.

It means you learned early that if you wanted to be safe, you had to become the one watching the door.

It means you walk to your car at night with your keys between your fingers. Nobody taught you. You simply absorbed it, the way a plant absorbs light.

It means your nervous system runs a threat assessment every time a man gets too close on a train, and you call it normal, because it is.

It means you have not been held by a man, really held, stilled, met, seen, in so long you cannot remember what it felt like.

On the relational level.

It means your father loved you and did not know how to reach you.

It means your brother was taught to armour at eight and has not cried in front of you since.

It means your husband loves you and cannot name three things that are alive in him right now.

It means your son is thirteen and has already learned to say I’m fine when you can see from across the room that he is not.

It means you have been in partnership with a man for years, and at some point the touch became functional, and neither of you has the language to begin the conversation that would bring it back.

It means your daughter is looking for a father in every boy she kisses. She does not know why. You do. And you cannot bear it.

On the cultural level.

It means the boys are killing themselves in numbers we refuse to look at.

It means the men are dying of loneliness, and the medical system calls it a hundred other names.

It means a boy can make it to twenty-five without a single adult man ever asking him how he actually is.

It means the men who legislate our bodies have never once paused to examine why they feel the compulsion to.

It means the men who run the extraction industries cannot feel the earth under their feet any more, because you cannot feel what you have been trained since boyhood not to feel.

It means there is a grabbing, narcissistic, wilful little boy’s hand in the highest office in the land, elevated there by the very culture that spent forty years pretending his violence toward women was locker room talk.

It means the Epstein files. The names. The drugged women. The children. The men who knew. The full-altitude demonstration of what happens when the unreckoned masculine reaches the top of a pyramid and finds that nobody has ever asked it to stand for anything.

On the archetypal level.

It means the Good Father has been exiled from our cosmology just as thoroughly as the Great Mother.

It means when a boy reaches for a template of the sacred masculine, he finds a soldier. When he reaches further, he finds an emperor. When he reaches all the way down, he finds nothing.

It means the only model of masculine divinity we have left in the dominant story is a jealous, punishing, solitary sky god who demands obedience and destroys what displeases him.

It means every myth of initiation, where the boy was once taken by the elders and handed back to the village as a man who had known the underworld and returned, has gone quiet.

It means there is no Osiris. No Green Man. No wounded healer. No holy king. No consort of the goddess in the dominant imagination. Only the uniform. Only the corpse with the uniform on it.

On the spiritual level.

It means the men do not know how to grieve.

It means they do not know how to descend, how to rest, how to kneel, how to belong.

It means a boy can make it to forty without ever having knelt before anything, and then we wonder why he cannot stand for anything either.

It means a generation of men has been trained that the only legal emotion is rage outward. And so everything else, the grief and the fear and the tenderness and the love, has metastasised into precisely the rage we are now watching externalised onto women, children, the earth, and each other.

It means we have built an entire civilisation on top of the wound of the missing father, and we have called the wound progress, and we have called the wound strength, and we have called the wound masculine.

That is fatherless. That is the air the men have been breathing. That is the air we have all been breathing.

The noble masculine would never stand for what is happening right now. He would block the way. He would throw his body between the powerful and the child. He would say no to his brothers and mean it. He would feel the earth underneath him.

His absence is what we are paying for. In bloodshed. In greed. In the abuse on the bodies of women and children. In a culture that cannot feel itself.

And the men who are doing the harm are also the men whose fathers never blessed them, whose elders never initiated them, whose culture handed them a counterfeit of themselves and told them to perform it or die.

Both are true. And if we cannot hold both, we cannot heal this.

The pulse underneath

What I am clear on is that, something is stirring.

It is not the revolution, yet. Not the arrival of the Father at scale. Not the end of patriarchy. Let us not confuse a first tremor for the shift itself.

But something. Something I have not felt in thirty years of doing this work.

Men are beginning to answer.

One wrote that he read Motherless and took it to his men’s group the next day. They sat in the silence afterwards and then one of them started talking, and then another, and they were there until midnight. Another wrote that he cried in a way he had not cried since his own father died. Another that he had been waiting his whole life for a woman’s voice in this space to tell him how to help.

We have been waiting over three thousand years for this. Longer, really. Through every witch trial, every silenced girl, every drugged wife, every legislative erasure, every generation of women who died without ever being met.

A handful of men writing to say this is terrible and I am with you is not the arrival of the noble masculine at scale. It is a few trees beginning to move in what is still an almost windless forest.

But the trees are moving.

I am not asking you, sisters, to throw a parade. Nothing about this rewards the basic fucking minimum that ought to have been the baseline for thousands of years. I feel the slight intake of breath at even naming it. I feel it in my own body.

And.

If I cannot feel the pulse of goodness beginning to rise in men, even now, even here, then I have lost the thread of what this work is actually for.

This work is not the accumulation of grievance. This work is the restoration of the Whole. The Mother, yes. And the Father. And the relationship between them, severed for ten thousand years. And the ordinary humans, women and men, whose bodies carry the pain of that severing, and whose bodies also carry, somehow, still, the pulse of what could be otherwise.

The return of one is the return of the other. This is the work of anyone awake inside the end of this long era.

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For the men who are reading, which I know so many of you are

I want to speak to you directly. Because the question you are most likely carrying, if this piece has moved something in you, is what do I actually do now.

Not a list of tasks. A map of the inner territory first, and then the outer action that follows from it.

You cannot call the noble masculine forward in the world without first calling him forward in yourself. Skip the inner movement, and the outer one will collapse the first time it is tested.

These are my invitations. They are very similar to the work my sisters and I have been doing for years, to recover and heal from the insanity and cruelty of patriarchy.

Meet the wounded boy inside you.

• Every man is carrying one. The boy who was not fathered, not blessed, not seen. The boy who was told his tenderness was dangerous, his tears were weakness, his fear was shameful.

• Most men have spent their whole adult lives pretending that boy is not there. Reclaiming the noble masculine begins with meeting him. Not fixing him. Just meeting him. Letting him speak. Letting him cry. Letting him be seen, possibly for the first time ever.

Grieve the father you did not have.

• Almost every man alive is carrying a grief about his own father. Either he was absent. Or present but armoured. Or he loved you and did his best and still could not teach you how to be a man, because nobody taught him either.

• That grief, moved, is what frees you to father differently. It is also what lets you stop looking for a father in every older man you meet, which is what unfathered men do without knowing they are doing it. Let it come.

Feel what you have been trained not to feel.

• Tenderness. Fear. Sadness. Longing. Need. These are not unmanly. They are the parts of you that were exiled when you were too small to defend them.

• You were told, somewhere between four and twelve, that real men do not feel these things. That was a lie. The difference between the great men and the rest is that great men had elders who taught them feeling is strength. Most of us did not.

• Start small. One feeling a day. Name it. Let it stay longer than it wants to.

Find your elders.

• Real ones. Men ten, twenty, thirty years older than you who have done this work themselves. Men who can see you. Men who can bless you.

• If you do not have any, go find them. Men’s circles. Therapy rooms. Recovery communities. The books of the men who wrote about this before us. You are not the first man to need an elder. Find yours. And when you do, let him see you.

Descend.

• Into your own shadow. Your own rage. Your own capacity for harm. Your own pornography use. Your own silences. Your own complicities.

• Most men skip this part. They do the nice parts of men’s work and avoid the underworld. The noble masculine does not. He is the man who has been there and come back. Who has reckoned honestly with what he has done, and what he has watched other men do and stayed silent about.

• You should not do this alone. This is what the circle is for. This is what the elder is for. But it has to happen.

Come home to your body.

• Your body is not a machine you drive. It is where you live. Most men have abandoned their bodies to the point where they cannot feel their own feet on the floor, cannot feel the difference between hungry and anxious, cannot feel whether they are tired or just running on momentum.

• Feel your feet right now. Feel your chest. Feel your breath. A man who is not in his body cannot father anything. Not a child. Not a company. Not the earth.

Reclaim your own voice.

• The voice that knows what you actually think, feel, want. The voice that has been performing something slightly other than itself since you were ten.

• Find it. It is in there. It is probably quieter than the performed voice, and more tender, and it probably says things you have been trained to swallow. The noble masculine speaks in his own voice. He does not speak in the voice the culture handed him.

And then, learn to be witnessed.

• This is the deep one. To reclaim the noble masculine is, at the deepest level, to develop the capacity to be seen by another whole human being and not disappear. Not armour up. Not shut down. Not run. Stay.

• Let her eyes be on you. Let your son watch you cry. Let your elder bless what is actually in you.

• This is the work of a lifetime. You will fail at it constantly. The willingness to keep practising is the thing.

When this begins to move in you, the outer work becomes almost obvious. But for specificity, here is what it asks.

• Find one other man this week and read this piece with him. Talk about what moved in you. If you do not have another man to do this with, notice that. That is the first wound.

• Find a men’s circle. The ManKind Project. Evryman. Sacred Sons. Your local men’s grief group. If none exist near you, start one. Three men. A living room. Regularity.

• Read. Robert Bly’s Iron John for the theory. bell hooks’s The Will to Change for the heart. Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return for the initiatory frame. Start with one.

• Interrupt the joke. The next time you are in a room of men and it lands wrong, do not laugh. One sentence, from a man, in a room of men, does more than a thousand women writing essays. “You are better than that, mate”. Stay in the room after you say it.

• Teach your sons with your body. Not with the lecture. With the way you speak about women when you think nobody is listening. They are always listening.

• Use your power. Whatever power you have. Promote the woman who deserves it. Believe the woman who reports it. Refuse the deal that requires you to look away.

• Come back. Come all the way back. Nobody is asking you to kneel. We are asking you to stand.

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For the women

• Tell the men in your life that you see the noble masculine in them. Directly. Out loud. I see the man in you who is more than this. I am talking to him. That sentence, spoken from the mouth of a woman who loves a man, is one of the oldest pieces of medicine there is. Most men alive today have never once, not ever, heard a woman say it.

• Name the good men out loud. Your father, if he was. Your grandfather, the uncle, the neighbour, the teacher. Say their names. Tell the story. Name the men in your life who are doing the work, the ones in circle, the ones in therapy, the ones showing up. Put them in front of the boys in your life as templates. Every time you name a good man out loud, you bring the archetype one inch closer to the surface of the culture.

• Bless the boys in your life. If you are a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, a teacher, a neighbour, a sister, a friend, bless the boys. Out loud. Tell them they are good. Tell them their softness is strong. Tell them their tears are welcome. Tell them they are not what the algorithm says a man is. Tell them what a man actually is. They will remember your voice for the rest of their lives.

• Send your husband, your brother, your father, your friend, to his own work. Not with contempt. With fierce love. Tell him you cannot do his grief for him. Tell him you cannot father him into himself. Tell him there is a circle of men waiting for him, somewhere, and his job is to go find them. Then let him go.

What I know in my bones

I began this piece at my altar, the morning after Motherless went out into the world, with the candles lit and my face wet. I want to end there too.

We are living through something. All of us. Women and men. The slow flood of these months, the files, the laws, the website, the ordinary horror of the news cycle. I am not going to pretend it is not happening. We are inside it.

And I am here to tell you, from the middle of my own body, that I can feel the pulse.

The pulse of goodness rising. The pulse of the desire in ordinary people to be more human with each other. The pulse of women waking up in numbers that frighten the structures that depend on us sleeping. The pulse of men beginning, tentatively, some of them, to answer.

The Mother is rising. I know this in my bones. She has been rising in my body and in the bodies of the women around me for years now.

And what became clear to me, in the writing of this piece and in the reading of what came back, is that the Father is rising with her.

He has to be. They have always belonged to each other. The one cannot come home alone.

So I am watching for him, The noble masculine, and I am calling him forward. The one we have not been allowed to meet for thousands of years. The one whose face is emerging, slowly, in the writing of the men who are finding their own voices in response to ours. The one who is stirring in the boys we are blessing. The one who is waking up in the men sitting in circles at midnight talking about grief for the first time in their lives.

He is coming.

Call him forward. Name him out loud. Refuse anything less.

The noble father is rising, beloveds.

The pulse is real.

Meet him.

P.S: A note on language and belonging

Since Motherless and Fatherless went out into the world, I have received a thoughtful and important letter from a reader who is a trans man, asking where the trans and non-binary community fits inside this framework. I want to answer publicly, because the question deserves a public answer.

The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine are not biological categories. They are archetypal frequencies. They live in every human being. We all carry both within us, and the work of Sacred Union — what the alchemists called coniunctio, what every wisdom tradition has understood at its depths — happens inside every soul, regardless of the body it lives in.

When I write in the language of women and men, I am writing into a cultural wound that has been enacted along binary lines. The website. The legislation. The Epstein files. The structures of patriarchy that have hurt all of us. Those have been organised through a binary, and exposing that binary is part of the diagnostic work of the series.

But the medicine — the calling home of the Mother and the Father — is for everyone. There is no version of this work that does not include trans women, trans men, non-binary people, and every human being who has felt the severance and is finding their way back to the Whole. The trans women who mother. The trans men reclaiming the noble masculine in themselves. The non-binary souls integrating both within. You are doing the deepest archetypal work there is. You belong inside this conversation. You have always belonged inside it.

If my language has not always made this clear, I want to make it clear now. The Sacred Reckoning is for all of us. The return of the Mother and the Father is the return of the Whole, and the Whole has no exclusions. It cannot. That is the whole point.

Thank you to the reader who wrote in. Your letter is the kind of generosity that makes this work better.

In love and devotion Elayne Kalila

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A note before you begin, my love. This piece moves through tender and activating territory. If today is not the day, please put it down. Make yourself a cup of tea. Come back when you are ready. The work will still be here. x

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I am sitting at my kitchen table reading the CNN article.

I have my tea next to me. The morning is ordinary. The light is coming in the way it always comes in. And I am reading a sentence about men lifting the eyelids of their drugged wives on camera to prove they are fully unconscious before they rape them.

I read it once and my brain stops and refuses to let it in.

I read it again.

Then I hear myself say it out loud, because that is the only way the words are going to land in my body.

“The website is called Motherless.”

And when I hear my own voice say it, something tears open. The horror moves through me in a wave that starts in my chest and keeps going. I am shaking. My hand is over my mouth. I hear myself say, out loud, to an empty kitchen.

What the fuck.

What the actual fuck.

What can possibly be next.

Because it is not just this, my loves. It is this, landing on top of the Epstein files, on top of the SAVE Act. Landing on top of the erasure of Roe Vs. Wade. And of everything else we have been absorbing month after month after month, each one a little more surreal than the last, each one a little more impossible to metabolise before the next one arrives.

This is the Handmaid’s Tale. We are in it. We are living in it. We are reading it in the news with our morning tea.

And I sit there, at the table, with the horror still moving through me, and I realise something that I want to bring to you now. Because I think it is the only place to begin.

The website is called Motherless.

Read that. Out loud if you can. Let it sit in your mouth for a moment.

Motherless.com. Sixty-two million visits in February alone. Twenty thousand videos of what the men on the site call “sleep content.” Tags like #passedout and #eyecheck. In those videos a man lifts the closed eyelid of his drugged wife on camera, to prove she is fully under, before he films what he does to her.

A Telegram group linked straight off the site. About a thousand men strong. They trade dosages the way other men trade fantasy football tips.

Bottles of tasteless liquid for a hundred and seventy-five dollars a pop, shipped anywhere in the world.

Livestreams of assault at twenty dollars a viewer. Crypto preferred.

This is not the dark web. This is the indexed, legal, ad-supported internet. This site had more monthly traffic than most newspapers. And the name at the top of the masthead is Motherless.

I want us to stay with that. Because the men who built this have told us exactly what they are. They always do. The name is the confession. The name is the unveiling.

Apocalypse does not mean destruction. The Greek root, apokalypsis, means to uncover and pull back the veil. And what we are watching right now, in the ordinary news cycle of April 2026, is the veil being pulled back on what a motherless world actually produces. This is not an archetype on a bookshelf. This is men, in their millions, congregating to render their own wives unconscious so they can use their bodies without the inconvenience of being witnessed.

Sit with that for a moment. They cannot bear to be seen by her. They need her eyes closed. They need her absent from her own life. They need her as object. The whole erotic charge is her unknowing.

What kind of man needs a woman drugged to touch her?

A motherless one.

I want to say very clearly, I have zero interest in shaming the men who have found themselves inside this machinery, and zero interest in protecting the men who built it. Those are two very different conversations, and I can hold both. As a psychotherapist, as a woman devoted to the return of the divine feminine and the Mother, what I am interested in is the diagnosis. And the diagnosis is written out in clear sight.

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What a motherless world actually feels like in the body

Let me tell you what motherless means. The felt experience of it, on every level we live on. Let this one land slowly, my love. Let yourself feel where each sentence hits in your body.

On the personal level it means..

You have never once in your adult life laid your head in someone’s lap and been stroked until you fell asleep.

When you are sick you manage it. You order the soup. You cancel the meetings. You text your mother an update if you have one. Nobody comes.

When you cry you cry alone, usually in the bath, usually at night, and you clean yourself up before you come out.

Your body has been braced since you were a small girl and you do not remember what unbraced feels like. Your shoulders are up near your ears right now. Drop them. Feel how fast they come back up.

You learned to mother yourself before you were out of primary school because there was not enough to go around, and you have been doing it ever since, and you are tired in a way that sleep does not touch.

On the relational level it means…

Your friendships are transactional and you know it. Voice notes. Schedules. Catching up. You love these women and you would do anything for them and you have not actually been held by one of them in a year.

Your daughter came home bleeding for the first time and you ordered her pads from Amazon and asked if she was okay and she said yes and you both moved on.

Your own mother is ageing and you do not know how to be near her grief, or your own, so you phone once a week and keep it light.

You have a husband or a partner or a lover, and the touch between you has become functional, and neither of you quite remembers when it stopped being anything else.

There are women in your neighbourhood whose names you do not know, and if one of you collapsed in the street, the other would call an ambulance and go home.

On the cultural level it means

Birth is a medical emergency managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.

Death is a medical failure managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.

Menopause is a deficiency to be corrected.

Menstruation is a hygiene problem.

Ageing is a cosmetic crisis.

The wisdom of a woman at seventy is worth less, socially and economically, than the smoothness of a woman at twenty five.

There is no cultural container for grief that lasts longer than a funeral.

We call a woman hysterical when she is telling the truth and composed when she has learned to swallow it.

The word crone, which once meant keeper of the deepest wisdom, is now used as an insult.

Your local high street has three nail bars and zero elders.

On the archetypal level it means…

The Great Mother, who for tens of thousands of years was the central image of the sacred, who was Inanna and Isis and Asherah and Tiamat and Sophia and the Shekinah and the Black Madonna and a thousand other names, has been exiled from our cosmology.

We live inside a story that begins with a father god alone in the sky. Alone. No partner. No mother. No consort. Just Him.

When a little boy looks up at the heavens looking for the divine, he is told to look for a man.

When a little girl looks up at the heavens looking for herself, she is told to look for a man.

The feminine has been cut out of the very shape of the sacred, and so has the body, and so has the earth, and so has everything we are made of.

On the spiritual level it means…

We do not know how to die well.

We do not know how to be born well.

We do not know how to grieve, or how to descend, or how to rest, or how to belong.

The body is treated as an obstacle to holiness rather than its temple.

We are ashamed of what makes us alive.

We have severed the cord that once connected every human being to the earth, to the ancestors, to the dark mysteries, to the rhythm of the moon, to the knowing in the blood.

We have a generation of seekers who are spiritually starving in a world where spirituality is a booming industry.

We have built an entire civilisation on top of a wound, and called the wound normal, and called the civilisation progress.

That is motherless. That is the air we are all breathing. Motherless.com did not invent this. It is just the loudest part of a song we have been humming for a very, very long time.

And yes, this is why Roe came down. And yes, this is why the SAVE Act threatens to disenfranchise millions of women who changed their names when they married. And yes, this is why the Epstein client list is treated as background noise rather than a five alarm fire. And yes, this is why Motherless dot com had sixty-two million visits in February.

They are the same story. They are the same severance. They are the same machine, wearing different uniforms.

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The ten thousand year severance

I have been tracking this for more than three decades, and I will tell you what I know.

The erasure of the Mother is of course not a recent thing.

For most of human history, and I mean most, stretching back tens of thousands of years, the sacred was feminine. We have her figures carved in mammoth bone and limestone, dating from twenty, thirty, forty thousand years ago. Wide hipped. Full breasted. Pregnant bellied. Held in the palm of the hand like a prayer. She is all over the archaeological record of our species, long before anyone was writing anything down, long before anyone was building temples to a sky father. She was the first image we made of the holy.

Around ten thousand years ago something began to shift. As agriculture took hold, as property took hold, as patriarchal structures of lineage and ownership began to replace older cooperative ways of living, the Mother started to be displaced. Slowly at first. Then not so slowly.

By about four thousand years ago the rewriting was well underway. In the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, the great goddess Tiamat is split in half by her grandson Marduk, and her body becomes the raw material for his new world. That is not a metaphor I invented. That is on the clay tablets. The primordial Mother, dismembered, and her body used as building blocks for a male cosmos. This is the founding text of the world we still live in.

Then came the last two thousand years in earnest. The temples of the goddess were systematically destroyed. The priestesses were murdered or forcibly converted. Asherah, who had been worshipped alongside Yahweh for centuries, was written out of the Hebrew Bible. The Great Goddess of the Mediterranean world, in all her many names, was declared demonic. The Gnostics who remembered Sophia were persecuted as heretics. Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles, was rewritten as a prostitute by a pope in the sixth century. The Black Madonnas were hidden in crypts. The village wise women became witches. Something on the order of hundreds of thousands of women, possibly millions across the centuries, were tortured and burned by churches and states for carrying the old knowledge, for being midwives, for being healers, for being eccentric, for being old, for being beautiful, for being poor, for being alone.

Every midwife replaced by a surgeon.

Every birth moved from the home to the hospital.

Every girl taught that her body was shame.

Every boy taught that softness was weakness.

Every grandmother dying alone in a facility where nobody knew her name.

I am writing this list long on purpose, my love. I want you to feel the length of the severing. Ten thousand years of pulling the Mother out of everything. Two thousand years of putting her to death every time she tried to return. And here we are, arriving at the inevitable end of that arithmetic, and we are shocked that men built a website called Motherless and sixty two million people visited it in a month.

Motherless.com is the logical outcome. It is what you arrive at when you remove the Mother from the cosmos long enough. The men there were not imported from some other world. They are our world. They are our sons and our husbands and our fathers and the man who delivered your package yesterday. Some of them are us on a different timeline.

Of course this is where it ends. Where else could it end?

Venus Of Willendorf created over 25,000 years ago.

To the men in our lives

And this is where I have to stop, and turn, and speak directly to you.

The men reading this. The ones who saw the CNN headline and felt sick in your body. The ones who are not doing this and cannot imagine doing this. I love you. I need more from you. And I am going to be specific.

Your silence is the oxygen this fire breathes.

The men on Motherless were not raised in some separate society. They were raised in the locker rooms and the group chats and the fraternities and the dinner tables you were also in. They heard the same jokes. They passed around the same early porn. They learned the same lessons about what a woman is for. The only difference between them and you is where you drew the line. They kept going. You stopped.

The question for you now is what you do with the ones who have not stopped yet.

One man. One real conversation. This week. I am asking you for that.

Ask your best friend what he actually watches. Ask your brother what he is teaching his son. Ask your father if he has ever really looked at any of this. Break the silence in the group chat the next time a joke lands wrong. Be the one who does not laugh.

Sit down with the boy in your life, whoever he is. Your son, your nephew, the kid you coach. Before the algorithm finds him, if he is still young. After it has found him, if he is not. Tell him what those images are actually designed to do to his nervous system. Tell him what a woman is. Tell him what he is. Tell him the truth about the first time you were shown something you wish you had not been shown, and what it cost you.

Become the elder. This role has been empty for three generations. It is waiting for you. You do not need a title. You need a willingness to say the true thing in a room where nobody else will.

If you are a man in a position of leadership, a pastor, a coach, a manager, a teacher, a father, name this from the front of the room this week. Do not wait until it is safe. It is never going to become safe.

This is what it means to mother men. Yes. I said mother. Because real mothering has never been soft. Real mothering sets fierce limits. Real mothering says no. Real mothering names the thing. Real mothering does not indulge the tantrum. Real mothering initiates. Real mothering drags the child out of the fire whether or not the child wants to come.

The Sumerians knew this. Inanna descends into the underworld, and she is stripped of her seven powers, and she hangs on a meat hook for three days. The goddess who hangs her there is Ereshkigal, her own dark sister. The Mother has a ferocious face. She is the one who says no. She is the one who ends things. She is the one who will not let you destroy yourself.

We have lost her. We have lost her so completely that we built Motherless dot com and handed it to our sons.

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How we bring The Mother back

So how do we bring Her back.

The Mother has never come back through PR. She moves the way she has always moved. Through our bodies. Through us sharing a meal. Through sitting at the bedside. Through being in circle. Through the No that saves a life, and the Yes that makes one.

So.

• Put the kettle on. Phone your mum if you still have one. If you do not, phone the woman who has been one to you.

• Ask your grandmother what she wanted to be before she was what she became. Write it down. She is carrying something that needs to be carried forward.

• Cook for someone who is grieving. Show up with the food. Do not ask if she wants it.

• Sit with the dying. Sit with the newborn. These are the same threshold, and they are both tended by the Mother, and both of them are being tended by strangers right now.

• Tell your daughter her blood is holy before anyone else gets to tell her it is disgusting.

• Find three women. Make a circle that does not break. No content calendar. No agenda. Just the circle. This is the oldest medicine there is.

• Walk on the land and say its name. If you do not know its name, find out whose land you are standing on. She knows.

• Eat a meal without a screen. Mourn out loud when you lose something. Refuse to be alone when you do not have to be.

• Mother yourself ferociously when nobody else is doing it.

• Say no with your whole chest. Say yes with your whole body. Stop abandoning other women. Stop abandoning yourself.

This is not a spiritual hobby, my love. This is how a culture comes back from the brink.

What we do now

Here is the action. All of it. Do as much of it as you can.

• Share this piece. Do not just read it and close the tab. This story will cycle off the news in seventy-two hours if we let it. We are not going to let it.

• Have one hard conversation this week. Just one. With a man you love. About what you just read.

• Follow the reporters who broke this. CNN’s Saskya Vandoorne. The German investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh. Amplify their work. They have paid for it.

• Write to your representatives. Ask them why Section 230 still shields a platform hosting twenty thousand videos of drugged women, and why the only enforcement on record is a paperwork fine.

• If you are a woman reading this and you are not in a circle, find one. Or start one. Three women. A kitchen table. Regularity. That is how it begins.

• If you are a man reading this and you want in, I will say it plainly. Find other good men and build something. Do not wait for the women in your life to convene you. That is the whole point.

And to those of us who have been doing this sacred work for years. The priestesses. The midwives. The therapists. The mothers. The writers. The healers. The witches. The ordinary women who are holding whole communities together with their bare hands.

We keep going. We deepen. We do not flinch.

The veil is lifting, beloveds. We are being shown, in broad daylight, what a motherless world produces.

What we do with the sight is the work.

Do not look away.

We are so much stronger together - remember you are not alone.

P.S. A note on language and belonging

Since Motherless and Fatherless went out into the world, I have received a thoughtful and important letter from a reader who is a trans man, asking where the trans and non-binary community fits inside this framework. I want to answer publicly, because the question deserves a public answer.

The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine are not biological categories. They are archetypal frequencies. They live in every human being. We all carry both within us, and the work of Sacred Union — what the alchemists called coniunctio, what every wisdom tradition has understood at its depths — happens inside every soul, regardless of the body it lives in.

When I write in the language of women and men, I am writing into a cultural wound that has been enacted along binary lines. The website. The legislation. The Epstein files. The structures of patriarchy that have hurt all of us. Those have been organised through a binary, and exposing that binary is part of the diagnostic work of the series.

But the medicine — the calling home of the Mother and the Father — is for everyone. There is no version of this work that does not include trans women, trans men, non-binary people, and every human being who has felt the severance and is finding their way back to the Whole. The trans women who mother. The trans men reclaiming the noble masculine in themselves. The non-binary souls integrating both within. You are doing the deepest archetypal work there is. You belong inside this conversation. You have always belonged inside it.

If my language has not always made this clear, I want to make it clear now. The Sacred Reckoning is for all of us. The return of the Mother and the Father is the return of the Whole, and the Whole has no exclusions. It cannot. That is the whole point.

Thank you to the reader who wrote in. Your letter is the kind of generosity that makes this work better.

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It happens when the lilies come out and when the daffodils are bobbing their heads. There is a quality to the light that is fresh and new and full of possibility. And there is that clear signal from mama Gaia herself as she emerges from the darkness of winter with the promise of rebirth. It is a collective moment that points toward resurrection.

And I find myself thinking: yes. But there is so much more here than we are being told.

I want to start by saying that this is not a teaching about dismantling Christianity, because I know how these conversations can land. This is an invitation to remember deeper. To understand that resurrection is not a single event that happened once, to one man, on one hill outside Jerusalem.

Resurrection is the oldest mystery on earth.

It is the pattern written into the body of every goddess who ever descended into darkness and returned. It is the pattern written into the earth herself, winter into spring, seed into bloom, death into life. And it is a pattern that is written into our bodies.

And lets be real, before there was Easter, there was Inanna, there was Persephone, and there was Isis.

And moving through all three, then as now, there is Magdalene. She who tends the resurrection. She who carries the oils. She who stays.

Death and return have always been at the very heart of the feminine mysteries. As the map. The map our bodies already know. The map our blood has always been quietly tracing, month after month, year after year, long before we had language for what it was.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Great Pattern: Descent, Darkness, and Return

Every culture that has ever lived close to the land understood something essential.

Life does not move in a straight line. It spirals. It descends. It goes dark. And then, if you can bear the waiting, it returns.

And beloved, let’s be real with one another for a moment. We do not have to look very far to feel that we are in the dark part of the spiral right now. Not just personally. Collectively.

The world we are living in carries every signature of the underworld passage. The old structures are crumbling. The certainties we organised our lives around are loosening. What we thought was solid is proving not to be. Institutions, ecosystems, economies, the very ground of what we thought we could rely on, these are all moving beneath our feet simultaneously. There is grief in the collective body right now that is enormous, that is largely unacknowledged, that has nowhere near enough tending or ritual container to hold it.

This is descent.

And the reason I say that matters, is not to offer false comfort or spiritual bypassing. I am not saying it will all be fine and for us to just trust the process. I am saying: we have a map for this. An ancient one, that has been carried through every civilisational darkness our ancestors have ever lived through.

The ancients encoded the pattern of descent and return into myth because myth is the language of the soul. When something is too vast, too primal, too true to speak plainly, we speak it in story. We speak it in the body of a goddess. We speak it in a ritual that moves us through the dark with our hands on a thread, so we can find our way back.

This is precisely why the goddess mysteries matter right now, in this moment, in this specific collective unraveling. As living navigation. The feminine mysteries have always known what to do when the earth goes barren. When the sacred is stripped from the world. When Inanna hangs on the hook and the fields go still.

They know because they have been here. They know because descent is not the end of the story.

And so, long before the first Easter morning, three great goddesses were already teaching us the mystery we now celebrate each spring. Not as comfort. As instruction.

Let me walk you through all three.

Inanna: She Who Chose the Great Below

We have to go back to 3500 BCE to find her in ancient Sumeria.

I still remember the first time I encountered her story.

I stumbled across her myth when I was in graduate school over 30 years ago. I remember picking up the book and as I was reading I could feel something deep inside me waking up, like a forgotten memory surfacing after being in the dark for a very, very long time. I was reading the book the way you read something that finds you, something that reaches through the page and places its hand on your heart and says: you already know this. Everything in me went quiet. Everything in me said, yes. This is the story, this is the one that has been missing. This is the map I did not know I had been searching for.

Because the moment I met Inanna descending, willingly, into the Great Below, I recognised it, not just as ancient history, but as my own life, as the seasons I had lived through without a language for what they were. Here were the gateways and the strippings I had endured, and the dark places where I too had been hung on the meat hook. And here was a story that spoke of the way I had eventually, painstakingly, returned to myself having reclaimed something of myself that I could never had gotten any other way.

This story is not ancient. It is alive. And as you will see, it is living inside your own body right now.

Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, the radiant Sumerian goddess of love, desire, and sacred power. She who was worshipped in temples for thousands of years before the Christian story began.

She the one who chose to descend, willingly.

From the Great Above, she turned her ear to the Great Below.

This is the opening line of one of the oldest written stories on earth, the Descent of Inanna, etched into clay tablets more than five thousand years ago.

Inanna descends to the underworld, to the realm of her dark sister Ereshkigal. And as she passes through each of the seven gates, she is stripped of everything. Her crown. Her jewels. Her robes. Her lapis lazuli measuring rod.

At every gate, another layer of identity, power, and protection falls away.

Until she arrives before Ereshkigal, naked, exposed, utterly without armour.

And Ereshkigal fixes the eye of death upon her.

Inanna is hung on a hook.

She becomes a corpse.

She hangs there for three days.

While Inanna hangs out in the underworld, the text tells us something devastating.

The earth ceases to flourish.

None of the animals breed, and none of the women fall pregnant. The crops do not grow. And there is fighting and pestilence amongst all the peoples. The above-ground world of life and love eventually goes barren and dark.

And let’s be real, this is not coincidence.

This is the ancient teaching that spans all cultures: when the sacred feminine goes into the dark, the earth goes with her.

When the deep, instinctive, life-giving force is suppressed, silenced, or stripped of her sovereignty, the world loses its fertility. Its creativity. Its capacity to bloom.

We see this in nature. We see it in culture. We see it in the bodies and spirits of women who have had their essence slowly dismantled over years, over lifetimes, over generations.

The barren earth is not merely myth. It is a reality that we currently living through.

But in the myth, Inanna does not stay dead. She rises, and she ascends back through the seven gates, reclaiming each layer of herself as she goes. And as she returns above ground, the world returns with her.

This is the first mystery of Easter:

Resurrection is the return of the feminine to her fullness.

It is not escape from the underworld, it is integration. It is the archetypal story soul that has been stripped to its essence, that has met its own shadow, that has hung in the dark long enough to be transformed, and that now rises carrying the wisdom of the depths.

Feel that in your body for a moment before we go on.

The Map That Lives in Your Body

Here is what I want every woman reading this to really sit with.

This pattern, descent, darkness, return, is not something that happened to Inanna once in a story. It is happening in your body right now. It has been happening since your first blood.

When we bleed, we descend, we have innate intelligence within our bodies that draws us inward. We know that this is a time when the veils thin. And our life force that has been held outward turns deep and instinctive and underground. This is the deep wisdom at the heart of all the blood mysteries. This is the Inanna gate. This is the stripping. This is a built-in initiation, monthly, lifelong, written into the very architecture of the feminine body.

When we menstruate, we descend inward, we are stripped of all the life force that we have been carrying in our wombs. We bleed, we shed, we go quiet.

When we ovulate, we riese, we return. New life force surges through us, and our radiance returns. Our body’s open toward the world again, full and fertile and ready to meet, to create, to offer. This is the the death and resurrection cycle that Inanna lives ,through her descent to death and her ascension, towards the reclamation of her crown.

And this whole spiral, from the fullness of ovulation to the descent of bleeding and back again, this is the feminine mystery in its most intimate and daily form.

But here is what I have been sitting with deeply, and writing about a great deal lately.

The monthly cycle is not the only arc this mystery moves through in the feminine body. There is a larger spiral. A longer descent. A more total stripping.

At midlife, we call it perimenopause. And I want to offer that name with something close to reverence, because what I have come to understand, is that it is not a decline or the body betraying us. It is Inanna at her deepest gateway into the reclamation of her true self, light and shadow integrated.

The years of perimenopause are the great undefended passage. The hormones that have oriented our inner life for decades begin to shift. The cycles become unpredictable, irregular, and unruly. The emotional body surfaces with an intensity that demands attention. What we have tolerated, suppressed, or quietly held together starts to insist on being seen.

This is our ancient goddess mysteries moving us through the the seven gates, of death and rebirth.

The identity we built through our mothering years, the roles, the ways of showing up, the identity organised around what we could produce and hold and create for others, this begins, gate by gate, to be challenged. Because there is something beneath it that is ready to emerge. Something that cannot emerge unless we are willing to be stripped.

The women who move through perimenopause fighting it, trying to maintain the rhythms and energetic availability of earlier years, these are the women who can end up suffering the most. And I know this so intimately, because I was one of them! What is real is that we are being asked to let go of everything at the gate, that we have been holding so tightly to.

And the women who surrender to it? Who let the descent do what the descent is designed to do?

They come through the other side as something unmistakable

As the queen of the underworld.

The crone who has met death and is not afraid of it. The woman whose wisdom is her embodied presence. And she has nothing left to prove because she has been stripped to the thing beneath everything, and found it indestructible.

This is the longest initiation the feminine body undergoes. This is Inanna’s full descent, lived not in three days but in three years, or five, or more, depending on how long the transformation takes.

And on the other side of it, she rises.

Not as she was, but as who she is now. Carrying what cannot be learned any other way.

This is why these lineages are not ancient memory. They are not history we are studying. They are the living inheritance of every woman who has a body that spirals, that descends, that returns.

We are not students of these mysteries. We are these mysteries. We are the living legacy of every mystery school and lineage that has ever held this knowing, from Sumer to Egypt to Eleusis and beyond.

These lineages are not relics. They live in our blood. They move in our bodies. They breathe in every circle where women gather and tell the truth about where they have been.

When we walk with Inanna, we are not learning about someone else’s experience. We are finding the name for our own.

Persephone: The Maiden Who Became Queen

Are you ready to come with me to another linege that holds the same map? Let’s travel now to ancient Greece, to a story that scholars trace back to at least 1500 BCE through the Eleusinian Mysteries, the great initiatory rites built around this myth, and to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter around 650 BCE. But like all the great feminine mysteries, it reaches back further than any text. It reaches back into the body of the earth herself.

Persephone, the maiden, the flower-gatherer, the beloved daughter of Demeter, the Earth Mother. She is taken. Pulled down into the underworld by Hades, into the realm of the dead. Now let me say something here - this is old patriarchal telling of the myth - in my version she is NOT taken she like her earlier counter part Inanna choses to go to the underworld. I’m just sayin’!

Anyway, whilst she is gone, Demeter, her mother, grieves. She does not simply mourn. She withdraws. She pulls her fertility from the earth. The crops wither. The trees shed their leaves. The fields lie fallow and frozen. The people begin to starve. All of heaven watches. Even the gods cannot move Demeter from her grief.

Because a mother’s grief is its own kind of underworld. Because when the Earth herself goes dark with sorrow, the whole world goes dark with her.

Eventually, Persephone returns.

And here is what is so beautiful, and so true: she does not come back as she left.

She left as the maiden, innocent, unformed, a daughter who gathered narcissus flowers in sunlit fields. She returns as the Queen of the Underworld.

She returns knowing death, and the shadow world. She knows the power of what it is to sit on the throne of the Great Below and look the raw, unadorned truth of existence in the face. And that is an initiation that the divine feminine has always held.

She returns, and Demeter’s grief lifts, and the flowers return with her. The fields remember themselves. Spring comes, because the maiden went into the dark and became a queen.

This is the second mystery of Easter:

True resurrection is not a return to innocence. It is a return to wholeness, carrying the wisdom of the depths.

We want to skip the descent. We want to go straight from the crucifixion to the Easter Sunday brunch. But the ancient mysteries would not allow it.

They insisted on the three days in the tomb. They insisted on the hanging on the hook. They insisted on the time in the Great Below, in the frozen earth, in the darkness.

Because the wisdom that transforms the world cannot be won cheaply. It must be lived.

Isis: She Who Re-Members What Has Been Scattered

Now we go to Egypt. Now we go to Isis. And here we go even further back than Inanna in the written record, all the way to the Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt, circa 2400 BCE, some of the oldest religious writings ever discovered.

She who is called the Great Magic, the Throne, the Keeper of the Hidden Name.

Her beloved Osiris is betrayed by his brother Set, who kills him and tears his body into fourteen pieces and scatters him across the lands.

And Isis, She-Who-Remembers, does not collapse. She becomes the one who gathers.

She walks the land by moonlight, searching the river reeds, climbing the cliffs, entering the dark places. Everywhere she finds a fragment, she anoints it with myrrh, the resin of grief, the resin of resurrection. She breathes over the broken bones until they remember themselves. She sings the ancient hum that calls spirit back into matter.

Until his body re-forms.

Until Osiris, the Green Lord, the grain, the green shoot, the buried seed, begins again to glow with life.

Osiris is a grain god. He is the wheat that is buried in the dark earth and rises again as new growth. He is the cycle of planting and harvest, death and return, encoded in the body of a deity and a devotional myth.

And it is Isis, through love, through magic, through absolute refusal to accept fragmentation as fate, who makes his resurrection possible.

She is the resurrection force.

Not passive. Not waiting. Active, devoted, searching, anointing, breathing.

This is the third mystery of Easter:

Resurrection requires a witness. A re-memberer. One who refuses to leave the fragmented thing lying scattered in the dark.

Isis teaches us that love is not a feeling. It is a practice of gathering. Of holding vigil. Of breathing life back into what the world has declared dead.

And now here is something worth sitting with.

Who in the Christian tradition is the first at the tomb? Who carries the anointing oils? Who stays when the others flee?

Mary Magdalene.

Magdalene: The Living Thread

The thread does not break. Isis becomes Sophia becomes Magdalene, the same devotional lineage, carried forward across the centuries, present at every threshold where death meets resurrection.

Magdalene is not a footnote, and she clearly not an afterthought in the Easter story. She is the living continuation of an unbroken lineage, the lineage of the one who anoints, who gathers, who refuses to accept fragmentation as the final word. She is Isis by another name, walking the same midnight roads, carrying the same sacred oils, doing the same ancient work.

And this matters because it means the feminine mysteries did not die. They went underground, the way seeds go underground, the way all things that are preparing to rise must first go into the dark. They moved through Magdalene, through Sophia, through the women in the mystery schools who kept the transmission alive in secret when the temples were closed.

They moved through circles of women who gathered and tended the fire.

They moved through the lineages.

And they moved into us.

This is not ancient history it is our inheritance. These mysteries live in our blood, they move in our bodies, they breathe in every circle where women gather and dare to tell the truth about where they have been and what they found there.

We are not students of the feminine mysteries. We are the feminine mysteries.

We are the living continuation of every mystery school and lineage that ever held this knowing. From Sumer to Egypt to Eleusis and beyond, the thread has never broken. It simply waited for women who were willing to pick it up again.

Easter Before Easter

The word Easter itself may carry this lineage in its very syllables.

The Germanic peoples honoured Eostre, or Ostara, a spring goddess of the dawn, of light returning, of the fertile threshold between winter and the growing season. The eggs were hers. The hares were hers. The flowers were hers.

Before the church calendar claimed this season, people were already gathering in the early spring light to celebrate what the earth was doing.

Dying.

Waiting.

Returning.

They did not need a theology to understand it. They felt it in the soil. They felt it in the lengthening of the days. They felt it in the ache in their own bodies after the long months of winter dark.

The doctrine came later.

The mystery was always already here.

What This Season Is Asking of You

We are in Easter season now. And we are also, whether we name it this way or not, in a particular kind of collective holy week.

The old world is in its tomb. I genuinely believe that. The paradigms that have organised so much of human life; the extractive, the hierarchical, these are not simply struggling, they are undergoing something that looks, from the inside, like collapse.

And I know how frightening that can feel. We are all feeling it I know. It is really challenging to be alive in a moment when the ground itself is shifting and there is no clear map of what comes next.

But here is what the goddess mysteries have always known, what Inanna and Persephone and Isis and Magdalene have always known, and what I believe with my whole body we are being asked to remember right now:

Eventually, the stone rolls away. But first, there are three days in the tomb.

We are the women who hold the thread through the dark. This has always been our function. In every civilisation that has ever unravelled, in every moment when the old world was dying, there were women in circles, in temples, in hidden rooms, tending the ancient knowing. Keeping the transmission alive. Refusing to let the thread break.

That is not just a metaphor, that is a lineage. And it is the lineage we are standing in right now, in our circles, in our temples, in the sacred containers we are tending with such devotion.

The world needs the women who know how to sit with what is dying without flinching. We desperately need women like you, who know how to tend what has not yet risen. Those of you who know how to hold the space between the tomb and the resurrection, with enough faith to keep breathing life back in.

This is our moment. Not in a grandiose way. In a quiet, rooted, deeply serious way. The world is in its descent. And we carry the map.

Which means this season’s invitation is both collective and deeply personal.

What has been in its tomb?

What part of you descended, perhaps willingly, perhaps not, into the dark? Into the season of stripping, of grief, of hanging on the hook of the unresolvable?

What has been waiting in the Great Below, not because it is dead, but because it is not yet ready to rise?

Because this is the invitation of the goddess mysteries at Easter. Not to rush the resurrection. Not to perform the alleluia before the stone has truly been rolled away. But to trust the three days. To trust the dark earth. To trust that what has been buried is becoming.

These are not abstract questions. These are the questions the mystery schools held for women in circle, in temple, in the sacred containers where the feminine mysteries were tended and transmitted across thousands of years.

These questions are your lineage.

Inanna teaches: you can survive the stripping. What you are beneath every layer is indestructible.

Persephone teaches: what you lose in the descent you will find again, transformed. The maiden becomes the queen.

Isis teaches: love gathers what has been scattered. The devotional practice of re-membering is the resurrection force itself.

And Magdalene, standing at the threshold of the empty tomb, weeping, wondering, she teaches: stay. Do not flee the darkness before the light has had a chance to reveal itself.

A Prayer for the Easter:

This spring, may you not simply celebrate a resurrection that happened to someone else, somewhere else, long ago.

May you stand at the door of your own becoming.

May you gather the scattered fragments of yourself with devotion.

May you breathe over the broken places, your own, and the world’s.

May you trust the ancient rhythm of descent and return that has governed this earth long before any of our stories about it began.

And may you know, in your bones, that you carry this lineage. Not as memory. Not as metaphor. As living blood. As present breath. As the mystery moving through you right now.

The goddess has always known the way through the dark.

She knows it still.

And so do you.

With love and reverence for our ancient lineages,

Elayne Kalila

If this teaching is landing for you, descent, resurrection, and the priestess mysteries are at the heart of the work we do together inside Priestess Presence. I would love for you to be there. Come check us out:

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This is the underbelly of that story. the part where I pull back the curtain and get into the nitty gritty of it all!

Because here is what I did not tell you in Part 1, even though I am here saying that we are not meant to do this alone, I spent years trying to do it alone anyway!! We live and learn, right?!

I spent years carrying the temple in my own body, making myself the pillar, and proving that I could hold the center without faltering. And I am here to tell you what that actually cost, what it broke, and what it took to finally, truly, live the truth I was teaching.

So if Part 1 was the vision, consider this the initiation. The part that happened before the wisdom. The real story, told as honestly as I know how.

So here I am.

And I want to begin by saying this: what I am about to share is the part I don’t talk about much. Not because I am ashamed of it, but because it has lived so deep in my body that finding language for it has taken me years. And because the stories of what is hard, what is messy, what nearly undoes us, are so rarely the ones we tell in public. We tell the vision. We tell the arrival. We rarely tell the cost.

But I have been writing lately about authentic transmission, about frequency, about the irreplaceable reality of what it means to speak from lived experience rather than from a curated surface. And it would be a contradiction of everything I believe to write about that and then offer you anything less than the real thing.

So. Here is the real thing.

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Daughter of the Patriarch

Here is what I did not expect when I set out to build a priestess temple: I discovered, almost immediately, how deeply I had internalized the patriarchy within me.

I had been working on it, truly. I knew the theory. I had the vision. I was deeply committed to a different model. And yet when I stepped into the role of founder, of being the nexus point, of being the woman at the center of an emerging field, I found something waiting for me that I had not fully reckoned with.

I had something to prove, I mean really PROVE!

And if I am really honest about what that something was, I have to go back further than the temple. I have to go back to a little girl who grew up with dyslexia that went undiagnosed until very recently, which meant that for decades I had no language for why certain things that seemed effortless for others felt impossibly hard for me. No framework, and no compassion. Just a conclusion, that arrived at early age and lodged deeply within me: I was stupid. Plain and simple! And if I was, in fact, stupid, then I had to work harder than everyone else. I had to prove, to every person watching, that I wasn’t.

That belief was my kryptonite, and I can tell you, it found a very happy home inside the early years of Priestess Presence!

Because here I was, stepping into an online world I didn’t know or understand, watching others out there offering their services, their programs, their polished presence, and the old wound was right there beneath the surface, whispering its familiar story. Who are you to do this? What do you actually have to offer? You had better hold this together yourself, because the moment you let go, the moment you lean on someone else, they will all see what you have always feared they would see.

And so I did what that wound had always trained me to do. I made myself the pillar. I took it all on. I worked myself into the ground in those early years, because somewhere in my conditioning, was the belief that doing it alone was what made you worthy. That needing others was weakness. That the weight of the temple should be mine to carry, because if I gave it to anyone else, I might become unnecessary. I might be replaced. Someone else might shine more brightly.

I wonder how many of you reading know what I am talking about and have done your own version of this particular dance?

The Sister Wound

Let me say that plainly, because I think so many women in leadership carry this silently: when I began genuinely encouraging other women to step into their gifts inside the temple, a part of me was afraid. Truly afraid. What if they were better than me? What if they took up more space? What if in building them up, I somehow made myself redundant?

The dyslexic girl who had spent her whole life working twice as hard to prove she was not stupid was not going to let that happen. Not without a fight.

The sister wound runs so deep within our collective. The insidious wound of comparison, of competition, of not-enoughness and too-muchness. The feeling that there is not enough space for all of us, that if I shine it somehow extinguishes your light, that if I succeed it comes at the cost of your success. These beliefs are woven into us, and they result in women feeling frightened to share their spaces, to champion each other, to genuinely celebrate the unique gifts that each of us carries.

It is, in my experience, the single biggest wound we carry as women.

And, lets be real, this did not happen by accident. The patriarchy has systemically and intentionally set out to have women do its ugly, dirty work of diminishing one another, because it serves the agenda perfectly. Keep us fighting among ourselves, keep us measuring and comparing and contracting, and we will never turn toward each other in the full force of our collective power. A sisterhood that truly trusts itself is one of the most potent forces on this earth. And patriarchy has always known that.

So, even as I was trying to build something that would heal this sister wound in others, I was still living it myself, in my particular flavor, with my particular story underneath it.

Shine Your Light

You cannot build a synarchy without encouraging and building up the gifts of others. That is not optional. It is the central tenet. And so the early years of building Priestess Presence were also, whether I was fully conscious of it or not, the years of my own initiation into genuinely trusting other women. Of learning, slowly and sometimes painfully, that sitting at the center is not the same as being the center. That my value was not contingent on being the most. That the temple would not collapse if another woman shone.

And perhaps most radically for that little girl still hiding inside me: that needing help was not proof of stupidity. It was proof of wisdom.

That decolonization of the patriarchal leadership model did not happen overnight. It has been one of the great works of my life. And my body, as bodies always do, kept the score.

What My Body Kept Score Of

I want to be honest about what happened when I tried to carry the temple alone. And it’s not a pretty story…

The truth is that for years, I functioned in a state of sustained overextension that I normalized so completely, that I truly could not see it from the inside. Those who loved me and were close to me saw it, and cautioned me, but being the wilful creature that I am, I did not take heed of their wisdom, I balked at it, (thank you Aires North Node!)

So I got deeply caught in the internalized patriarchal model of doing it all myself, of being the pillar, of never letting the center waver and spending every waking hour making sure that the temple was ok. And all of it, of course landed in my body. And eventually, my body made it impossible to continue.

During my perimenopausal years, I entered what I have come to call a sacred reckoning. The hormonal upheaval of that transition, layered onto years of sustained depletion, created a crisis that I could not push through or manage or optimize my way out of. And then came long COVID. And then an autoimmune condition that I am still navigating today.

As I write this I am wondering how many of you might relate, sthe circumstance of your life might look different- but the outcome might be similar?

2023 - 2025 were, if I am honest with you, some of the most difficult years of my life. There were many months when I could not function, where I could barely get out of bed, and where the pain in my body was so acute that normal, everyday life was too much let alone leading a massive temple. The tenacious capacity I had always been able to rely on simply was not there. And the question was no longer how do I lead this temple, but how do I get through this week?

And here is what that taught me, in the most embodied and undeniable way:

The synarchy we had been building was the very thing that held the temple when I could not. It was the architecture that allowed the work to continue, the women to be held, the field to remain coherent, even when I was not able to be the pillar I had once tried to be. The distributed intelligence of the sisterhood, the circles within circles, the fractal architecture we had slowly and sometimes awkwardly built, revealed its true purpose in that season of my fragility.

You build the synarchy before you need it. Because when you need it, you will not have the capacity to build it, that’s for sure!

That is not a strategy. That is a teaching that only the body can give you.

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The Moments It Nearly Fell

Building something that has no blueprint is not glamorous, I gotta tell you! There were seasons, more than one, when I genuinely did not know if we would survive it. I often felt like I was barely keeping my head above water.

One of the most significant came between 2018 and 2022, during the seismic cultural upheaval of the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the rightful, urgent demand from our sisters of color and from marginalized communities to be seen, to be centered, to be genuinely included.

We were not prepared for what that reckoning revealed.

Like so many spaces in the conscious and spiritual world, Priestess Presence had become, without our full awareness of it, white-centered. We were operating with a kind of invisible template that we had not examined, that we had not even recognized as a template. And when that was named, when our sisters of color began to call it in, the discomfort and the disruption that moved through the community was significant.

At the time, I had a Facebook community of over 30,000 women. And I made the decision to close it. To unplug that group entirely, because what it had become was no longer serving the vision of what the temple was meant to be. That was not a small decision. It was the loss of something we had built over years. And it was absolutely the right one.

What grew in its place was something more intentional, more examined, more genuinely inclusive. We built a centralized hive of diversity within the temple. We looked honestly at how we were reaching, and not reaching, women of color and other marginalized communities. We did the uncomfortable, necessary, ongoing work of examining our own blind spots, which we are still doing.

But I want to be honest: it was rocky. There were ruptures, relationships that fractured, conversations that were painful, moments when the weight of it felt genuinely overwhelming. And it was, I now understand, an initiation. Not just for me personally, but for the temple itself. A reckoning with its own shadow that was necessary for it to become what it was always meant to be.

There were other wobbles too. I came to this work as a healer, a therapist, an artist, a performer. I was, in the most genuine sense, an accidental businesswoman. I had no business experience when I started Priestess Presence as an online temple community. I was forging my way in a world that had almost no models for what I was trying to do.

Fifteen years ago, I began using the term sacred business. It is a common term now. Back then it barely existed. The very word priestess was still met with an eye roll in most circles, still considered fringe, still something that had to be defended and dignified in the marketplace. We were not just building a temple. We were building the language, the framework, the cultural permission structures for this kind of work to even be taken seriously.

That was its own kind of exhausting. And its own kind of exhilarating.

The Grief of Not Being Able to Do It Alone

And I also want to speak to something that does not get named enough in conversations about collaborative leadership: there is grief.

The grief of realizing that the vision you carry cannot be held by you alone.

For me, that grief was bound up with identity and worth. With a version of myself that I had built around being capable, being central, being the one who could hold it together, the one who could and would work the hardest to make sure the mission was achieved. And when I began, slowly and with great reluctance, to genuinely let others in, to actually share the center rather than just talk about sharing the center, what I encountered first was not relief. What I encountered was loss.

I had to let go of a certain story that I was carrying about who I was. And even more confronting, I had to navigate the loss of the control that had felt like safety. Because if this wasn’t just about me then I was no longer going to be in control of it all. And then followed the loss of the familiar, if painful, architecture of doing it all myself. For even though it was literally too much for me to carry alone, being in seeming control of it all was my version of safety - back then!

But truly, even deeper, underneath that loss, there was something even more tender: the fear of truly needing other women. Phew, there I said it!

In the world of Priestess Presence, I get to talk with women every day, and I know how hard it is for so many of us to admit, first to needing support, and then to actually allow ourselves to receive it.

For me, needing women meant trusting them. And trusting them meant being vulnerable to disappointment, to rupture, to the specific grief of the sister wound that I had been working to heal in the collective, while still carrying it in myself. Not to mention the ravages of the Mother wound! More on that later!

It took many years of working within the Priestess Presence circles to cultivate the kind of trust that makes genuine synarchy possible. Real trust, not aspirational trust. The trust that is built through rupture and repair, through hard conversations, through the slow accumulation of showing up for each other across time.

And what I found on the other side of that surrender was something I could not have predicted.

I found that I was more myself, not less. That sharing the center did not diminish me, it freed me, it nourished me, and it delighted me! And that the gifts of the women around me did not threaten my own; they illuminated them. That the temple, held by many, became more alive, more resilient, more genuinely powerful than anything I could have built or sustained alone. And that has been the single biggest revelation of my life and I feel so deeply honored and proud of what WE have all built.

The grief was real, that’s for sure. And the gift on the other side of it was even more real.

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What It Built

So here is what I want to say to every woman who is building something counter-cultural and feeling the cost of it.

I see you. I honor you and I am at your back…

I see the exhaustion of forging a path that has no map. The disorientation of trying to lead from a model you are still unlearning. The particular loneliness of building something, whose value the world around you, has not yet recognized. The grief of the wounds, in yourself and in the sisterhood, that surface precisely when you are trying to do the work that would heal them.

I know what it is to feel overwhelmed by the task at hand, and I know what it requires of you, and how deeply you are being initiated.

Because this is what I have come to understand after twelve years inside this experiment: the temple initiates its builders even more deeply than it initiates those who come to learn inside it.

You cannot hold a field of genuine transformation without being transformed by it. You cannot invite others into the healing of the sister wound without being asked, again and again, to face your own.

You cannot build a synarchy without having the patriarchal conditioning in your own nervous system dismantled, piece by piece, often by the very situations you least expected.

That is not incidental. That is the design.

And here is the hope I want to leave you with. Not the naive hope of the beginning, before the cost became clear, but the earned hope of someone who has been through the reckoning and is still here, still building, still believing.

What I know now that I could not have known at the beginning is this: the structures we build in the sacred feminine, when we build them with genuine devotion, when we allow them to be fractal and relational and distributed rather than centralized and dependent on one body, become more resilient than we can imagine. They hold when we cannot. They carry the transmission when we are depleted. They reveal their true intelligence precisely in the moments of crisis.

We were never meant to do this alone.

Not as a consolation. Not as a workaround for our limitations. But as the actual design of the feminine. Interdependence is not a compromise of the vision. It is the vision. And every moment of rupture, every season of depletion, every grief of surrendering the center, is the temple asking us to live more fully into the truth we are teaching.

I am still learning this. In my body. In my leadership. In the slow, beautiful, sometimes devastating work of building something that is bigger than me and will outlast me.

And I am so grateful I did not do it alone.

So much love to you...

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And when I say we, I mean specifically those of us who have chosen to build our lives and our work inside the sacred feminine. The priestesses, the temple holders, the coaches, the teachers, the circle weavers, the women who have oriented their businesses not around profit extraction but around genuine transmission, real relationship, and the slow, devotional work of building something that actually matters. This is written for you.

Because I believe we are standing at a threshold that most people have not yet recognized for what it truly is. I don’t see this as a crisis or a threat, but an invitation. A profound and timely invitation to lean fully into what we have always known, and to understand, perhaps for the first time with real clarity, why the way we have always worked is not behind the times. It is ahead of them.

So if you have been feeling uncertain about how to navigate AI in your sacred business, if you have been wondering whether to use it, how much to use it, or whether using it means somehow betraying the integrity of what you carry, then this article is my offering to you. A lantern, not a rulebook and a perspective to feel into, not a prescription to follow.

With all of that said, something is rapidly moving through our world right now, and I think it deserves our full, discerning attention.

In the last year, I have watched the incredible and disruptive technology ofAI move through the world of conscious creators, spiritual teachers, coaches, and temple holders. I have watched it move through my own world. And it has stirred in me a recognition, that feels too important, to leave unspoken.

We are living through a moment of profound technological acceleration. Artificial intelligence can now write your newsletter, generate your social media captions, draft your sales pages, outline your courses, and produce in seconds what might once have taken you days. It can mimic warmth, it can replicate the cadence of care and it can even, if you prompt it cleverly enough, sound a little like you!

And this is precisely where I want to pause.

Because frequency doesn’t lie.

I want to say that again, because I feel it deserves to land slowly, the way a hand placed on your heart deserves a moment before you respond.

Frequency doesn’t lie.

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Your words can be polished, your brand can be curated, and your content can be scheduled and optimized and distributed at scale. But your transmission, the living, vibratory signature of your actual presence, your unique nervous system, your hard-won wisdom, your genuine grief and aliveness, that cannot be manufactured.

Your transmission, signature, or frequency cannot be templated. And no matter how sophisticated the algorithm becomes, your body will always know the difference between, when you are being met by another amazing human soul, and when you are being processed.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not here to instill in you a fear of AI. I am not here to sound an alarm, or to tell you to throw your laptop into a river, or to pretend that AI is not genuinely useful, because it is, and I will speak to that in a moment. But before we go there, I want to speak about something else.

This is an invitation to enter this moment with some discernment, with depth, and with the particular kind of wisdom that we have carried in our sacred feminine lineages: the knowing that what is real, what is alive, and what is rooted in genuine relationship, will always outlast what is merely efficient.

The Flattening and Repetition

This is really what I have been seeing and feeling…in my own heart and body.

When any technology becomes widely accessible, when it can be used by anyone, to produce anything, at any time, the inevitable tendency, particularly within a culture still organized around extraction, productivity and speed at any cost, is toward homogenization. Toward sameness, toward what I see as the efficient average. Which in my mind is mediocrity at its worst.

And to quote Martha Graham - “The only sin is mediocrity”.

And, I am sorry to say it, but I believe we are already beginning to see this.

Scroll through any spiritual content feed right now, and you will notice something: a peculiar convergence of voice. It’s just too smooth, like a well manicured lawn that is missing any sense of the wild and feral. Sure the sentences can be eloquent, but somehow also bloodless. There can be insights but somehow they are wise-adjacent, and they don’t quite land in your body, or ever so slightly don’t hit the mark. And the content can have some depth but the truth is doesn’t energetically transmit it.

And let’s be real — you can feel it.

And if you are anything like me, you have a reaction in your body that turns you off, and maybe even causes a flash of irritation or an eye roll. Because our bodies, as we know, are extraordinary at picking up what is real and true.

I can’t tell you how it makes me want to scream when I see the line - “there comes a time in a woman’s life when…” And I want to say to the person who let that slip by their radar, no one will read this,’ because you didnt take the time to make sure it was your voice!!

We are literally designed to feel frequency, and recognize truth when we encounter it. And this skill is at the heart of our priestess training! So what is real for me is this: when I come across writing that is purely AI-generated, rather than resonating in my heart or landing in my body, it leaves me feeling repelled and distanced. Like reaching for a hand and finding a mannequin. This is the signature of AI-generated, or AI-heavily-shaped material.

So let me pause here, and say that this doesn’t mean that the technology is bad. It means that AI is trained on the aggregate of what has already been said. Which means that by its very nature, it tends toward the center, toward the familiar, toward the phrasing that has already worked. Which is why you keep seeing the same irritating phrases over and over again!

So what we need to know is what it cannot do. And what it is structurally incapable of doing, is to generate what has never existed before.

To get this we have to understand that AI at it’s, at its core, is a pattern-completion engine. Yes by now it already extraordinarily sophisticated, genuinely impressive, and yet fundamentally it is oriented toward what already exists. Which means that you, not it, are the creative daemon. You are the source of novel inspiration, of genuinely new thought. The spark that has never existed before. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

AI cannot transmit your particular frequency, because your frequency is not a pattern extracted from the past, it is a living moment in time. It is what happens when your unique constellation of experience, wound, healing, devotion, and becoming meets a lived experience and says, this is what I see from where I stand. This can’t be reproduced, it is not content - it is a transmission, and more specifically it is your transmission- as unique as your thumbprint.

And here is where the danger lies: one I feel we must name clearly, in outsourcing that transmission to a machine, even a brilliant one, we run the deep risk of erasing this unique and powerful energetic circuitry that is at the heart of our human relationships. When we totally outsource to AI we don’t just lose our voice, we lose our signal. And we lose the coherence between what we say and who we are. And the people in our communities, the women in our temples, the students in our circles, feel that gap, even when they cannot name it. Our intelligent bodies know. Frequency doesn’t lie.

The Real Gold of the Return of the Feminine

So here is what I find so extraordinary, so almost breathtaking about this moment, when I let myself sit with it from a wider perspective. And it is waht is inspiring me to write this article…

For centuries, truly for millennia, the ways of the sacred feminine have been dismissed, diminished, and reviled. The feminine has been declared impractical, and unimportant in a patriarchal world organized around productivity, efficiency, and scale.

Relationality has been seen as soft, time consuming and too much work. Being slow, listening, connecting, and feeling, have been viewed as costly to the bottom line of productivity. Tending to the depth of genuine connection has been considered a luxury that the business world had no time for.

I have had numerous conversations over the years, about how we operate Priestess Presence. One reflection I have had is that we are far too high touch, and I have always replied, we are high touch because we value connection, intimacy and relationality. And because our sisterhood, and our entire sacred business is built around these values.

So what is happening now?

Well, now we find ourselves inside a technological revolution where the greatest risk is the collapse of authentic, heart-centered human connection. We are facing a critical erosion of our individual voices, and the homogenization of our creativity, spirituality and culture. What we are teetering on the edges of, is the replacement of genuine human presence, with the illusion of presence at scale.

And the result? A deep and spreading dismantling of trust. Is this real? Is this person real? Can I trust what I am seeing and reading?

These questions are moving through our collective body right now, and they are moving fast. I am sure I am not the only one feeling this. I have had so many conversation with women who are in the sacred feminine space who are feeling the same way. Every day seems to blur into the next, the pace relentless, the ground constantly shifting beneath our feet. And AI itself is part of this acceleration, not merely a product of the speed, but one of its engines.

So what is the antidote?

Well here is the good news, I think it is precisely what we have always known.

Intimacy, and genuine relationships are gold. Containers held with real devotion, circles where you are known, not marketed to. Communities where the transmission is embodied, transmitted, is honest, and real. Temples where what is exchanged between women cannot be downloaded or replicated enmasse, because it lives in the space between us, in our collective mycelial nervous system that we have slowly, carefully, lovingly woven together.

The sacred feminine way, the matrilineal, relational, synarchic, fractal architecture I wrote about in We Are Not Here to Do this Alone Part 1 of this series, is not simply surviving the age of AI. It is becoming the most valuable thing on offer.

Feel that in your body.

What we have always done, what has always been our way, is the very thing the world is starving for right now. The world has more content than it has ever had, more information, more access, more noise. And into that noise, what cuts through? What lands? What do people gather around, again and again, willing to give their time and their trust and their resources?

Authentic transmission, genuine presence and real community is priceless. You can not replace, scale, or automate the experience of being truly seen and held in a field of devotion.

We have always known that this was sacred. We are only now beginning to understand that it is also, in the deepest sense, the gold standard of what’s coming.

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What AI Can and Cannot Do

I want to be honest here, because I have seen how our spiritual communities sometimes swing toward an ideological rejection of technology, that is neither accurate nor wise.

AI can do extraordinary things.

I use it to help organize my ideas when I am stuck or overwhelmed. I have had wonderful exchanges in developing structures for a curriculum that I already have in my bones, but need a partner to bounce ideas off.

I have asked it to draft a first pass at something administrative so I can spend my precious energy on what only I can bring.

And certainly it has been an amazing ally in projects where I want to search, compile, and synthesize at a scale and speed! In truth I have found AI to be genuinely liberating.

But let’s be clear this way of relating with AI is as a tool in service of my transmission rather than a replacement for it. Because nothing can replace my, or your transmission. That is your energetic blueprint and your frequency can’t lie.

So my love, the distinction that I want to burn into your awareness, is that AI is a tool in service of your frequency, which is fundamentally different from it being a tool that substitutes for your frequency. Which of course it can’t actually do!

When a painter uses a finer brush, the painting still carries their presence. When a priestess uses a ritual object, the object transmits her devotion. The tool is in service to the transmission.

What I am naming as dangerous, what I am seeing, and feeling in the field, and witnessing within our communities, is the subtle, easy, understandable drift toward letting AI become the voice, rather than simply a brush in the hand of the voice.

And let’s be honest, it is so understandable, because we are exhausted. The demands of visibility in this era are relentless. The hustle era of building numbers, of being always on social media and feeding the beast have taken their toll on so many of us, myself included. I know I am not alone in feeling this, because the sheer volume of content required to remain present in digital spaces has become genuinely unsustainable for any one of us. And I know that I have been choosing to be in my life, in my own practice, and in my community ,over using all my time chsing some ever changing algorithm!

And yet, and this is where I want to be a voice in the wilderness if I must, the answer to that exhaustion is not to outsource our frequency. It is to radically reconsider what we are actually being called to offer.

As women inside sacred spaces, priestesses, ceremonialists, divine feminine teachers and guides, we were not called to produce content at scale. We were called to transmit truth in relationship- in interconnection to our lived experience. And those are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing.

The Temple as Counter-Architecture

When I look at what the Priestess Presence Temple has been building across these twelve years, the interlocking circles, the distributed intelligence, the fractal embeddedness I described in the synarchy piece, I now see something I had not fully articulated before.

We were, without knowing it, building the antidote to exactly this moment.

A temple is creative, diverse and inclusive of all of our unique frequencies by nature. Because a temple is a field. It is not organized around a single voice projecting outward to a passive audience; it is organized around a living, relational, mutually constituting web of presences. What emerges inside a true temple is not content, it is culture. And culture cannot be generated by an algorithm, because culture is what happens when human beings, in genuine relationship over time, transform one another.

Temple is the architecture that will hold us as we travel in the uncertainty of the future.

Because it is genuinely, structurally, irreducibly human, and it creates a chalice of; belonging, depth, genuine transformation, and the lived experience of being held within a field of shared devotion. Which is what no technology can ever replicate, and exactly what people will move toward, as digital spaces become increasingly saturated with the flat, deadened voice of AI.

The temples that we have built in the sacred feminine lineage, with devotion and in relationship to the needs of all, without the backing of venture capital, or playing the game of algorithmic amplification, are positioned, perhaps more than any other model, to become the cultural containers that this era most needs.

I am not being hyperbolic when I say this. I am calling forth what feels like the prophecy of the rise of the Divine Feminine. The return of an analog world that is a rebalancing that we have all been starving for, where we are focussed on right livelihood that actually nourishes all of us.

From my lens, the scarcest resource in a world drowning in generated content, is not more information, or strategy. It is not another course or another email sequence or another carefully optimized funnel.

It is genuine human transmission and heart centred connection.

It is the experience of being in a room, or a circle, or a temple, with someone whose words you feel before you understand them. Someone whose presence changes the quality of your own breath. Someone who is not performing wisdom but living it, becoming it, and inviting you, through the sheer authenticity of their frequency, to do the same.

That is what we carry.

That has always been what we carry.

And in this particular moment in history, when we are all asking is this real? And with information abundance making curation meaningless, with people genuinely starving for something that lands in the body rather than merely landing in the inbox — that which we carry is not a niche offering for those who prefer the old ways.

It is the essential offering.

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Tending Your Frequency

So what does it practically look like to move through this age without losing yourself to it?

First: make your practice non-negotiable. Your frequency is not a static thing; it is a living signal that must be actively tended. Silence. Stillness. The practices that return you to yourself, whatever they are, in your lineage, in your body, are not luxuries. They are the ground condition for everything else.

Second: before you use any tool AI or otherwise, ask yourself one question: Is this in service of my transmission, or a substitute for it? That is the line. That is the discernment that matters. Use what serves, and release the rest.

Third: invest in depth over breadth. In an age of scale, depth is the counter-move. One genuine circle, one true sisterhood, one temple where people are known and held over time. These are not smaller versions of success, they are a different kind of success entirely. A kind that the market is only just beginning to understand.

Fourth: let your voice be yours. Let it be uneven sometimes, let it be unpolished, let it track your thoughts that are just arising and not even yet fully formed. Then we will feel like you are talking to us. Because that aliveness, that realness, is a transmission. It is your signal and it is precisely what people are longing to find.

And fifth, perhaps most importantly, remember that you were never meant to reach everyone. You were meant to reach your people. The ones whose nervous systems respond to your particular frequency. The ones who, when they encounter your transmission, feel something click into recognition in their own body. That is the nature of a genuine relationship.

The Golden Age Is Already Here

Here is what I want to leave you with, Love.

We have been told, in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that the sacred feminine way is too slow, too relational, too unmeasurable, too inefficient for the world of our patriarchal fathers. We have been told that scale and influence is the measure of success, and that what cannot be scaled cannot be significant.

I am here to tell you: that story is over.

We are entering an age in which what has always been our nature, our relational intelligence, our devotional presence, our capacity to hold a genuine field, our insistence on the irreplaceable reality of embodied transmission, is not simply valuable. It is, if I am reading this moment correctly, the very architecture the world is going to organize itself around next.

The temples that we have been built with love, genuine devotion, and with the slow and unglamorous willingness to tend real relationships over time, these are not behind the curve of what’s coming. They are the curve. They are the counter-architecture. They are, I dare to say, the seeds of the culture that will grow in the space that the current collapsing system cannot reach.

AI of course is and will reshape the surface of our world faster than we can manage to metabolize or understand. And as it does, what will become increasingly rare, increasingly precious and increasingly sought-after, is the real thing. The lived thing. The thing that moves in your body before your mind can frame it.

Your frequency.

Do not let anyone convince you that it is not enough. Do not let the efficiency of AI persuade you to streamline yourself out of your own signal. Do not trade the living gold of your genuine transmission for the convenience of the almost-real. Because it is not real enough- and we know it.

Goddess knows the world doesn’t need more content.

It needs more of you.

Frequency doesn’t lie. It never has. And in the age of AI, perhaps especially in the age of AI, it never will.

So much love to you...

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Almost all of the posts carry a similar pulse: the longing for a culture in which the children are at the center of the wheel; in which the earth is our source and our most ancient relative; in which our elders are honored; and in which those who are most vulnerable are no longer positioned at the lowest rung of a hierarchical ladder, but are understood as the very measure of our civilization’s integrity and heart.

I really feel that this conversation is being stirred by an awakening in our collective heart, where so many of us are beginning to feel, almost viscerally, the grief of the systems of governance we have built and consented to. Systems that have become soulless and self-serving. Systems that have forgotten how to hold others in the field of care and community. Systems that have not asked how to uplift and tend the astonishing gifts of all who live within them, but instead have extracted, overlooked, and stratified.

There is a quiet heartbreak moving through us — a recognition that we have organized ourselves in ways that do not feel like love.

And this is the reckoning that we are in - right now. Before I go any further it feels important for me to say here, that matriarchy, at least as I understand it, is not the simple inversion of patriarchy, it does not seek to put women at the top of the same imbalanced and dysfunctional ladder that patriarchy inhabits.

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What is Matriarchy?

True matriarchy, in its deepest and most ancient sense, is not about female supremacy at all, but about a life-centered and life-affirming orientation. It is about creating a culture organized around care, relationality, potent cyclical wisdom, and the recognition that power is something to be stewarded, and shared. I think of it more as matrilineal consciousness - rather than a political stance.

It is about returning our hearts to the center of the wheel — as a structural matrix.

And by matrix, I mean its original meaning: the womb source, the originating field, the generative container, the formative environment. In essence, the underlying structure within which we grow and develop and through which consciousness itself is shaped.

This distinction is crucial, because a matriarchy—rightly understood—is not merely concerned with who governs, but with the nature of the matrix that is doing the governing. It is focused on the development and well-being of all us, and in truth is designed to foster, nurture, and encourage each of us to become more fully embodied, in the unique gifts and codes that we carry. And the potent power of this system is that, as we develop and grow, we all weave our unique gifts back into the collective, so that the collective culture itself is enriched by the presence of each of us.

In this sense, matriarchy is an ecology of humanity restored. Feel that in your body for a moment. A world organized around humanity. I will be writing much more on this at a later date as this forms the foundation of the Magdalene path for me.

Matriarchy at its healthiest does not seek to erase the masculine; it seeks to restore balance between principles of masculine and feminine that were never meant to be severed. It presences the embodied feminine and calls forth the noble masculine - the aspect of the masculine that is here to protect and safeguard all life.

Matriarchy does not collapse structure; it re-roots structure in nourishment.

This is radical, and by radical I mean in its original sense, from the Latin radix, meaning root, a return to the source, to the foundational soil of life itself, where power grows in relationship, and structure arises from nourishment and nurturance.

This is not to romanticize matriarchy, because even though this vision may stir something inside us that feels hopeful — so much more beautiful than the world we are currently inhabiting — we must remain cautious of any model that simply swings the pendulum without transforming the underlying consciousness. Because, let’s face it, if the inner architecture of domination remains intact, it doesn’t matter who sits on the throne — the system will inevitably replicate the same distortions and imbalances, and eventually collapse under their weight.

So my curiosity has never really been about swapping patriarchy for matriarchy, but about what might open up if we began experimenting with structures that don’t depend on supremacy at all.

What if being at the top, being the best, being the most powerful, isn’t the only measure of success? What if there’s another way to define thriving — one that isn’t built on someone else having to be beneath us?

Right now, there is a huge reckoning underway.

We know that the system we are currently living inside has reached a visible fracture point: extractive economics, dominance-based power structures, the prioritization of productivity over presence, and the quiet normalization of the abuse of women, children, and those who are marginalized in any way. We can feel that in our individual and collective body.

And as patriarchy, in its death throes, begins to stagger exposing how corrupt and dis-eased it has become, of course our collective imagination turns toward alternatives. If not this, then what? If not a ladder of dominance, then what kind of structure would serve to support and uphold everyone of us? If not centralized authority, then what kind of field of governance could actually sustain life?

So it makes sense that matriarchy would arise in this moment as counter-image — as re-centering, as mothering principle, and yet as I sit with these conversations, what stirs in me is not simply ideological agreement, but a very personal curiosity born from my own lived experience.

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The Lived Experiment

For the last twelve years, quietly and, if I am honest, somewhat accidentally, I have been living inside an experiment in governance that has required us to ask very similar questions: What does leadership look like when it is not concentrated in one body? What happens when authority is genuinely distributed? What becomes possible when the center is a role rather than a single ruler at the top of the ladder?

What I rarely speak about publicly — perhaps because it has been so foundational to my own becoming that I forget it is not visible from the outside — is that these last twelve years have not simply been about teaching the Magdalene Way, nor about building programs, nor even about guiding women through initiatory thresholds.

They have been, in truth, an experiment in synarchy.

When I began what would eventually become Priestess Presence, I was not attempting to architect a new leadership model; I was running an online immersion on the Magdalene as Sovereign Queen, following what felt like a devotional thread, unaware that beneath the surface of that offering, something far more mystical and magical was beginning to constellate.

Very quickly, I became aware that the field gathering around the Temple work carried an organic intelligence of its own. What was unfolding was a new shape — and it was not about me mimicking a patriarchal, hierarchical structure, nor about becoming large and in charge in some familiar vertical way. It was something far more fascinating, far more alive.

It was about listening — really listening — and responding to a structure that wanted to weave laterally, relationally, like a mycelial network beneath the forest floor, connecting, nourishing, transmitting, without a single dominant trunk.

In essence the temple and school devoted to the Divine Feminine wanted to take form in a feminine, circular, spiralling, networked way…of course it did!!

It wanted to become a living, breathing, alive temple, one that had its own sacred intelligence.

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Collective Leadership

As I continued to listen into the Temple as it took form, it became clear that it was organically webbing its way into a structure that could not be held by one person alone.

What I have come to recognize is that a temple can never be about one person; it is about the community — or in this case, the sisterhood — gathering around a force that is greater than any of us. Call her the Goddess, the Higher Power, or the Unified Field.

Over the last 12 years, more than 200,000 women have touched and been part of growing this field in some way, and many thousands have moved through our myriad of trainings as modern-day priestesses. Yet what has mattered most to me is not the number of women, as much as the sacred architecture, that has slowly, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes exquisitely, emerged as a crucible to hold those who have gathered.

I have been amazed and marvelled at what has organically grown through our love, devotion and dedication. And what it has shown me is that matriarchy becomes operationalized through another powerful word and embodied concept: synarchy.

I first learnt of this term when I was studying the ancient Mellisae and Bee Priestesses and I wandered onto a path called the Way of Pollen. This resulted in my becoming a bee tender and in that process I began to learn about the magic and mystery of how a hive actually functions.

Synarchy, in its simplest definition, means joint rule. But lived synarchy is far more nuanced than that phrase suggests.

Bee Hive Intelligence

If you imagine a beehive, every bee-ing within that hive serves the queen, yet in this temple the queen is not a personality, not a woman, and certainly not me; the queen is the animating intelligence of the field itself, the devotional axis around which the entire organism coheres.

Even writing these words gives me chills- because it feels so aligned and true.

In order for a true synarchy to exist it must be in service to something greater than our own personal gain. There must be something bigger than any of us that acts as the anchor in order to create something that truly strives to serve all who are part of it.

From the very beginning of Priestess Presence, I knew that if temple were to be a legacy beyond my own capacity, and beyond my lifespan, then it could not be organized around me. It had to be about more than me, it needed to be about all of us, it needed to foster the brilliance of the sisterhood, and it needed to be designed so that those who were called, could also step in leadership.

But if I am really honest about this I had not idea how to do this!

What i discovered was that much to my chagrin I was indeed a daughter of the patriarch. I was, as so many of us are, deeply conditioned by internalized patriarchal leadership models that whispered, sometimes insistently, that I had to be the pillar, the central organizing force, the one who held the weight without faltering. And yes during the early years of Priestess Presence, I played this out to the enth degree- literally working myself into the ground - but more on that later…

It has taken me years to decolonize the “you have to do it all alone” imprint, and my body has held the score on this one. It has taken me years to truly get that sitting at the center, is not the same as being the center.

What is real is that within the Priestess Presence Temple, there are many of us who sit at the center— because that center point is an axis, a frequency position, a focalizing role whose primary function is to hold the integrity of the field rather than to be large and in charge of it!

And what I have learned — in ways that have honestly surprised me — is this: the center is interchangeable.

It isn’t a throne. It isn’t an identity you fuse yourself to. It’s a role. A seat you hold for a while, in service to the field, and then step out of when it’s time. The axis isn’t owned; it’s stewarded. And when the architecture is truly sound, when the devotion runs deeper than ego, that center can move without everything falling apart.

That, for me, has been one of the most potent and radical realizations of all.

Over time, as circles formed within circles — faculty councils, mentorship constellations, governance bodies, nested sisterhoods — the architecture began to resemble sacred geometry more than any kind of hierarchical chart.

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The Flower of Life

The Temple organically took the shape of the Flower of Life — not because we set out to model it that way, but because when we eventually tried to draw diagrams to explain what Temple actually was, and that was the shape that appeared. Interlocking circles, each complete unto itself, each intersecting with the others, each containing within it the pattern of the whole.

We didn’t impose the geometry; we recognized it. It was a living expression of what we have come to call fractal embeddedness.

And by fractal embeddedness, I mean something exquisitely alive: a fractal is a self-repeating pattern in which the structure of the whole is mirrored within each of its parts. The small reflects the large. The micro carries the blueprint of the macro. Each node is not separate from the whole, but an expression of it — scaled differently, yet organized by the same underlying intelligence.

In nature, fractals are everywhere — in the branching of trees, in river systems, in the vascular networks of our bodies, in the architecture of lungs, in lightning, in coastlines, in the spiraling intelligence of galaxies. They are the way life organizes itself so that growth does not require domination, and complexity does not cause collapse.

In living systems, fractals create resilience. They allow for adaptability without fragmentation, for individuality without isolation, for coherence without rigid control. The intelligence is not centralized in one apex point; it is distributed throughout the whole system. Each part carries within it the imprint of the whole field, and therefore can respond locally without severing itself from the larger pattern.

This is why fractal architecture matters so deeply in a matriarchal, synarchic model. Because in this kind of system, leadership is not concentrated at the top of a hierarchy, but embedded throughout the network. Each circle — whether it is a mentorship cohort, a governance council, a faculty body, or the wider sisterhood — contains within it the same devotional axis, the same relational sacred agreements, the same values of care and accountability that exist at the center.

It functions much like a nervous system — not as a single brain dictating every movement, but as a distributed web of sensory intelligence, where information flows in multiple directions, and response is coordinated rather than commanded. Or like mycelial networks beneath a forest floor — unseen yet profoundly connective — transmitting nourishment and information across vast distances without one central authority orchestrating the exchange.

Fractals require distributed coherence in order for them to remain fluid and stable — which means the integrity of the whole depends not on one controlling point, but on each part embodying the pattern faithfully.

​​In this way, synarchy is an elegant patterned interdependence which is fluid, responsive and attuned to the collective.

And to be honest, this is precisely where patriarchal architecture begins to reveal its rigidity. Because patriarchy, particularly in its current late-stage dis-eased expression, is profoundly anti-fractal. It centralizes authority rather than distributing it, consolidates intelligence rather than trusting its diffusion, and relies upon vertical command structures in which the flow of power moves upward for validation and downward for enforcement. Sounds oh so familiar, right?

Such systems can appear strong — even efficient — but they are not resilient. When intelligence is concentrated at the top, the culture becomes dependent upon a single nervous system, a single interpretive lens, a single decision-making point. Remove that point, destabilize that point, or corrupt that point, and the entire structure loses its compass, and its ability to navigate. And look at where this has laneded us in this current moment!

A fractal system, by contrast, does not collapse when one node falters, because coherence is distributed. Leadership is cultivated throughout the body. The pattern is not owned; it is embodied, this is its structural reality.

So what I have seen through the years is that what we have been building inside the Priestess Presence Temple is not merely a spiritual container, but a living counter-architecture — evolutionary at its core, and part of a greater re-patterning that is vibrantly underway, as the Divine Feminine rises once again within our collective field.

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So Love, if we are to move beyond dominance-based systems, we cannot simply swap who stands at the top of the pyramid, we must question the pyramid itself.

We must ask whether a vertical model is the most life-aligned way to organize human intelligence at all.

Fractals do not rise in ladders, they expand in relationships. And perhaps that is the deeper invitation of this moment — not to replace one ruler with another, but to design systems whose strength lies in heart aligned coherence and integrity.

I am not here claiming that synarchy is the ultimate fix to all our problems. But I am deeply curious about what it might offer us as we begin to imagine the kind of world we actually want to co-create.

Recently, I’ve caught myself saying, in almost every Temple I am part of, how profoundly grateful I am that this is the reality I get to live inside — alongside the extraordinary women who are co-creating it. And I mean that. It has made navigating the horrors of this moment more bearable — if that is even something I can say without hesitation.

Perhaps what is truer is this: it has given me hope. Hope that there are other ways we can come together. Hope that we can build structures rooted in support rather than supremacy. Hope that we are not confined to the architectures we inherited, but capable of co-creating something far more life-giving for everyone.

What I do know is that if matriarchy is to be more than myth, more than aesthetic, more than longing — it must become structural, it must become embodied, and it must be able to withstand the sea when it turns. And the good news is that with Saturn now in Aries - we have the structural feminine on hand for the next couple of years.

What that has required of us — and what nearly broke us — is a story for another moment. Stay tuned for Part 2!

For now, I simply want to say this: We were never meant to build the future alone. We need the brilliance and unique gifts of everybody to come together and vision the world that we long to live in. And we need a culture that values and calls forth these gifts in everyone.

So much love to you…

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It wasn’t just the Epstein files — and the ongoing fantasy from our deranged administration that somehow “we the people” are going to let this one slide as just another news cycle… WTAF.

It wasn’t just the New Moon Solar Eclipse that jittered the bejeezus out of our nervous systems, or that Saturn and Neptune are doing their thing in Aries, striking that strange match between dissolution and reckoning.

It was somehow an unholy confluence of it all.

I feel like I have been riding the Fire Horse bareback from moment it was released from captivity last week, after sixty years (since 1966) — no saddle, no reins, just raw elemental force.

WTF, we might well say.

The Night My Heart Sounded the Alarm

On Monday night — the eve of the New Moon Solar Eclipse — after spending the day digging deeply and deliberately into the Epstein files, corroborating reports, cross-referencing testimonies, listening to voices across the spectrum of media and analysis, but really researching, my heart went into what I first thought was arrhythmia. More accurately, it was actually PVCs, Premature Ventricular Contractions.

This is when your heart goes into spasms that create the sensation of a missed beat, followed by a heavy thud, a hollow pause, and a surge of adrenaline that tells your brain something is very wrong. And this in turn creates a nightmarish feedback loop of central nervous system activation, adrenaline and cortisol flooding the system which in turn makes the skipped beats and racing heart worse…

It feels like your heart is exploding and that your body is sounding the alarm.

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3AM: Eclipse, Hot Flash, and Apocalypse

So in the wee hours of the morning just as the eclipse hit its zenith I was lying there in the dark having a rabid hot flash/night sweat, hand on my chest, feeling that irregular pulse — I could not help but wonder whether my body was simply reacting to stress… or whether it was responding to something far larger moving through the collective field.

Because this did not feel like ordinary anxiety, it felt like a rupture in the very fabric of reality. An apocalyptic moment.

It was abrupt and frightening in the way only the heart can be, when it loses its rhythm, it was for sure in my face and demanding every ounce of my attention.

As I lay in bed, practicing every kind of breathwork technique I have ever used to calm a dysregulated nervous system — and believe you me, I have quite a few of those — I became acutely aware of how lonely it feels to be faced with something like this at 3am, when the world is sleeping and the dark amplifies everything.

There is something about the middle of the night that makes the body’s alarms feel more ominous, more existential, more dangerous and lonely.

I started to pray, fervently and urgently. I called out — to my ancestors, to my angels, to the Magdalene — to come and be with me, to help me stabilize, to help me feel like I was not losing my mind in the quiet hours.

And as I lay there, breathing in fours and out in sixes, I became aware of something else almost more confronting than the PVCs themselves.

It was in the recognition of how often I don’t ask for support, how reflexively I assume that I must muscle through it on my own. How deeply the internalized architecture of patriarchy still lives inside my self-sufficient cells — the old programming that says strength means handling it alone, that sovereignty means not needing anyone, that my ability to deal with it and not need support is somehow proof of my competency… bleh…

Lying there, I felt the hot prick of tears gather at the edges of my eyes and the weary recognition come over me. Recognition that even after all these years of devotion, of teaching, of temple work, there are still places in me that default to isolation. I am so bored of this, and so done with this pattern, I suspect I am not alone in that…

The Magdalene in the Dark

And it was there in that tender recognition, that the Magdalene came as a clear and recognizable presence. She wrapped her arms around me, as she has done so many times in moments of deep need. I felt her embrace steady, her arms reminding that I am never alone.

That we are never alone.

And as my breath softened inside that remembering, as the tears finally slipped down my face, something in my chest unclenched, because love had entered the room. And that — perhaps more than any breath technique — is what steadied not my heart but my consciousness — it calmed my spirit to be able to tolerate being on the otherwise intolerable ride.

And then I thought “of course this is happening right now.”

Of course this is how my highly sensitive nervous system responds when the collective field is in rupture. Of course this is how my menopausal body, stripped of hormonal buffering and living closer to the electrical currents of the world, metabolizes insanity.

I have been tending my heart for years now — learning its patterns, tracking the hormonal tides of my daunting perimenopausal years, unraveling the early childhood dysregulation that wired vigilance into my system before I could name it, understanding how trauma can embed itself into the circuitry of the heart and wait patiently for activation.

The Collective Heart is Breaking

As I laid there I kept thinking this did not feel like just a personal activation, it felt larger. It felt as though something in the collective field had torn open — a moral membrane ruptured — and my body, already sensitized by decades of inner work and devotional inquiry, responded as if the signal had come directly through my chest.

And I could not help but imagine all the other women — the thousands of us in midlife whose bodies are so sensitive, whose nervous systems have been finely tuned by years of holding children, holding partners, holding communities, holding grief.

How many of us are feeling this right now?

How many of us are struggling to stay afloat, to remember to breathe — to hold our hearts as they break.

How many of us are laying in the dark with a racing or stuttering heart, wondering if something is wrong — when perhaps what is happening is that we are registering the tremor of a collective reckoning?

How many of us are feeling our primal instinct that was going far beyond our own personal bodies into the collective body — the body that knows when there are pedophiliac manics in power and no one is safe from their greed and insanity.

Of course this is how we would feel it, in our hearts first.

As the week unfolded, I found myself howling at the moon — sometimes literally, sometimes inwardly — feeling waves of anger, grief, rage, nausea, disbelief, and something even more raw: a grief that we have allowed ourselves to be divided for so long while unspeakable harm was protected behind power.

In truth I had to step away for a few days. I had to regulate. I had to tend to what support my body needed — how my nervous system like a canary in the coalmine had let me know that rest, silence, nurturing and tending was needed. I anointed myself all day long with my beloved rose oil (well known for its ability to help soothe the nervous system, regulate the heart and help with stress just FYI). I sat with my dogs and walked in the mad snow storm that rendered us trapped in our house for a few days.

And during those days, as I spoke quietly with women — sisters and friends — something became unmistakably clear.

So many of us were experiencing heart symptoms. Many women shared with me the same thing: palpitations, tightness, a fluttering or hollow feeling, a sense of being “off,” as though the ground beneath our feet was shifting — and it was for sure not business as normal.

It got me thinking — what is really happening in our hearts right now?

Yes, my PVCs are connected to the hormonal intelligence of midlife. Yes, it is connected to a nervous system that learned vigilance early. Yes, it is somatic history expressing itself. But more than that, I began to feel something else moving.

There is a ripping open of the collective heart, there is a revolution of the heart underway. And revolutions feel destabilizing, they feel like the dam cracking. They feel like our rhythm is lost before a new rhythm or order can emerge. We are in one of these moments. We are most certainly discordant, dissonant and incoherent as a collective.

Love As Refusal

So in midst of the heartbreak there is something else also rising…

What I am witnessing in the United States right now, and I say this carefully, because I know how polarized our landscape has become, is something wild and miraculous.

I am seeing people who voted for Trump now publicly refusing him. I am seeing women who have been silent speak out and risk their own personal safety in service to the collective need for the reckoning. I am hearing men who previously aligned with systems of bravado and denial call one another into accountability. I am listening to political commentators from across the ideological spectrum say, “No. This crosses a line.”

It’s a messy, complicated, harrowing time we are living in. But what I can feel underneath all of the noise is something unmistakable: A categorical NO.

And that NO, to me, is love.

This is the LOVE I have been waiting to take root in our hearts.

A Love that is not sentimental or hashtagged — but a Love that rises as a visceral Hell No, felt deep in the marrow of our shared humanity, when “We the People” say: you will be held to account, and you will not get away with this.

This is the kind of Love that, when it awakens, protects, draws a line and says NOT ON MY WATCH.

For years we have been pitted against one another — red against blue, urban against rural, educated against uneducated, men against women, vaccinated against unvaccinated, right against left — while something far more insidious operated in the shadows.

It has been bloody exhausting, hasn’t it?

The constant outrage, endless culture wars, algorithmic baiting, and dopamine hits of indignation.

This system has been so effective at keeping us fighting one another that we have not been looking at the real atrocities unfolding in plain sight — our attention divided, our anger redirected sideways instead of upward, our fear of difference weaponized to keep us busy.

It is an old playbook. Marx wrote about it plainly — the most efficient way to control a population is to keep them fighting amongst themselves, to inflame class, race, ideology, identity, so that the people never unify around the structures that exploit them.

And guess what? It has worked.

It has worked so well that we began to mistrust our neighbors more than we mistrusted power. We have been so polarized that we can’t bear to listen to each other’s differences. We have been baited into being unbelievably intolerant of our differences.

It has worked so well that we forgot what it feels like to stand shoulder to shoulder across difference. Until, perhaps, right about now.

Because what I am sensing — what I am feeling in my own chest, in my heart — is that something has finally crossed beneath the noise of ideology and struck the bedrock of conscience.

This is not left versus right, not red versus blue.

This is human versus inhuman.

And when that line becomes clear, Love stands up, Love protects, Love refuses to be played any longer.

And that refusal — that shared, embodied No — feels like the first coherent heartbeat I have felt in a long time.

The Dam Is Breaking

No, we don’t all suddenly agree on everything. But there are some things that violate the core architecture of humanity itself. And that recognition is unifying people who would never have stood together before.

This is an intense and bloody difficult spiritual awakening. This is not one of those news cycles that will pass in three days.

This feels like a line being drawn in the sand of the collective conscience.

And perhaps my heart and our hearts are destabilizing because the old rhythm — the rhythm of denial, of polarization, of distraction — is collapsing.

What is real is that no matter if we are looking at the news,or we are not tracking what is happening out there — it is not really happening out there — it is happening here…

And we are each metabolizing exposure at scale. We are metabolizing betrayal at an immense scale. We are metabolizing the realization that what we thought was “just politics”, is an entire system is riddled with corruption - a true crime syndicate of the kind of scale that many of us could not have imagined.

When my heart went out of rhythm, I initially interpreted it as just my own inability to metabolize all the energies shifting in the world…

But as I sit here now, feeling a subtle steadiness return, I am wondering if it was actually resonance. My heart responding to a collective arrhythmia. My body registering that something old is dying and it is not going quietly.

I am not naïve. I know the complexity of geopolitics. I know that power never yields without resistance. I know there are narratives within narratives. But what I also know — viscerally — is that something has shifted.

I spent the last few hours listening across the spectrum — commentators I agree with and those I do not, men who once embodied the very machismo I have critiqued now sounding almost broken in their refusal to look away, women speaking their stories without apology, analysts naming corruption with a clarity that transcends party lines.

And what I feel is gravity. It is a people of every walk of life sensing that this cannot simply dissolve into the next distraction.

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The Inflection Point

I don’t think that this is simply another news cycle, it this feels more like an inflection point.

So love, if your body has felt off this week, I really don’t think you are not losing it - you are having a very sane response to the insanity.

If your heart has fluttered, tightened, or raced, I would say that you are in touch with this seismic moment. And love, if you have felt an intensity of anger surge through you are a part of this collective rising. its not just happening in you - Its happening in all of us. We the People…

There is an acceleration of energy moving through the collective field right now. And I know that it can feel overwhelming and deeply confronting. But what I am aware of is that alchemically it has to feel destabilizing before it reorganises itself into a new harmonic of love.

Solve et Coagula is the alchemical principle that, in my priestess world, is intimately connected to the Goddess of Compassion. At its heart, it speaks to a sacred sequence.

First, we must dissolve we must allow the old structures — the ones not formed from love, compassion, mercy, or kindness — they must be allowed to break apart. We truly have to let the rigid architectures of fear, domination, indifference, and harm lose their footing. We must be willing to watch what is false fall away. And since most of us are embedded in these structures it feel very confronting to let this happen…I know.

Only then can we coagulate, re-form, re-weave, and re-cohere new structures — structures aligned with a higher harmonic frequency, structures born of love, mercy and our of shared humanity.

And I can feel this alchemy at work — beneath the noise, beneath the outrage, beneath the commentary — an energetic vibrancy emerging as people begin to find their footing. I feel the power of something miraculous rising in our shared human hearts…

As I have slowly re-regulated my own heart, what has returned is a keen awareness, a clarity, a steadier rhythm beneath the turbulence.

I have felt the presence of the Magdalene and with her a knowing that love is a boundary, love is refusal, love is saying: we will not pit ourselves against one another while this kind of harm hides behind power.

Something had to break the dam. And perhaps this — painful, destabilizing, and exposing as it is — is what is doing it.

My heart knows this is not going away. We are going to have to learn how to travel through this one (just as we did in the Covid pandemic) yet I also know the field feels different. There is a quality of collective attention that does not feel like it will be easily stopped, or diffused or distracted.

And so here we are.

Our hearts are raw, our bodies are lit up. And our nervous systems are recalibrating.

And together we find ourselves standing with those that we have been polarized from suddenly feeling our shared heart and humanity and knowing that there is a ferocity in the way of love, that is as an embodied refusal.

So if your heart has been breaking open too — know that you are not alone in that rhythm. Something larger than any one of us is reorganizing the pulse of this time.

And yes loves, we are feeling it in our hearts first — in our hearts that are breaking for all that has been lost, for all the betrayal, for all the illusions that can no longer be held on to — This is an apocalypse for sure.

A Breath With Me

Love, before you scroll to the next thing, before you go back into the noise, before your nervous system has to carry one more headline, one more revelation, one more wave of grief or rage — take a breath with me. I am doing this right now as I write…

Put one hand on your chest, one hand on your womb.

Inhale slowly… and exhale

Let your jaw soften. Let your shoulders drop.

Let your womb feel my womb, your heart feel my heart…

And just ask yourself,

What am I feeling right now

• What do I need in order to sustain and resource myself right now?

• What does my heart need?

I am here with you

in such love and devotion

Elayne kalila

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How do I stay soft and strong in love while living inside a world this intense?

So before anything else, let me just ask you…

How are you doing today? Are you breathing? Have you taken a moment to let beauty find you… even just a little?

Because I want to talk about a very real face of love right now.

Love as resistance through self-care and nurturance.

For me this is part of what it means to walk as a modern-day priestess, not as an idea, but as a lived, embodied practice.

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What I have been contemplating, as I sit by the fire, is that alongside the very real atrocities, grief, and heartbreak we are witnessing, there is also something else happening. Between the constant news cycle, the doom-scrolling on our phones, and the feeling that we have to keep up with everything that’s happening in the world in order to care, there is a very real price being paid in our bodies and our nervous systems.

And I think it’s really important that we name it.

This doesn’t mean what’s happening isn’t real. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care or bear witness.

It means the way it’s coming at us matters.

Especially for those of us called to walk as modern-day priestesses, because our work in the world depends on presence, perception, and the ability to stay rooted in the heart. This is what we signed up for!

So many of us, and if I’m honest with you myself included, are walking around overstimulated, dysregulated, braced, holding more than our systems were ever designed to carry on their own. And when we live there for too long, it begins to take a real toll.

What we are living through is not normal - in fact anything that could be called normal exited sometime ago. These are highly complex and challenging times…

To cope we either harden, dissociate, numb out, avoid, or collapse. These are extremely human reactions to a world that feels insane. It’s what happens to most of us when it all becomes too much. Our bodies are highly intelligent and when we feel overwhelmed it is a signal that something in us is asking to be tended, not pushed through. My loves, it’s time to slow it down and come back to our bodies.

Because if we don’t tend to them, and we live in the heighted space of stress we become way less resilient. We struggle to relax. We don’t get enough good sleep. We forget to nourish ourselves. We normalize a state of emergency in our bodies and as a result we find ourselves unable to soften and sit into the wisdom at the center of our hearts.

I have heard from so many of you in the last weeks that you can’t sleep, or that your anxiety is off the charts. And honestly — that’s not surprising.

And this is exactly why I am here with you right now. Because I know that the priestess path is sit in Love in the face of adversity and chaos: to stay human, tender, and present, even when everything around us feels chaotic insane and unsteady.

And I want to share something personal here, because this isn’t just something I’m observing — it’s something I’ve lived and worked with for decades.

Before I walked this priestess path, I was for many years a somatic psychotherapist, working specifically with the effects of prolonged trauma and heightened nervous system activation. This was my specialty, especially with women who had survived all kinds of horrifying abuse.

And this work was deeply personal for me.

I had lived for most of my teenage and young adult years struggling with a debilitating panic disorder and an extremely dysregulated nervous system. I know intimately the price of living with that much stress and cortisol running through my body day after day. I know what it costs to live in a constant state of bracing, vigilance, and overwhelm.

It is a price we cannot afford to keep paying.
Not now.
Not ever.

Because the toll on our bodies when we do not tend our nervous systems is profound. Exhaustion. Anxiety. Illness. Disconnection from pleasure, intuition, creativity, and rest. And beyond the personal cost, something else happens that matters just as much.

We become less effective in the world.

When our nervous systems are strangled by chronic stress and dysregulation, we lose our center. And when we lose our center, we are no longer fully present. We cannot offer the brilliance of who we are. We cannot act as coherent magnifiers of love, because that love has nowhere stable to land.

Instead, we become dissonant. Discordant. Fragmented. Love as a coherent signal cannot transmit clearly through a dysregulated system.

So when I speak about nervous system care, I am not speaking abstractly. I am speaking as someone who has lived it, studied it, worked with it, and now teaches it as a core part of the modern-day priestess path.

Which brings us back to the real question underneath all of this:

How do we regulate and attune to love in a world that would have us feel like we are running for our lives on the daily ?

This is a survival question,and it is also a leadership question.

Because the more coherent our nervous systems are, the more clearly love can move through us—and the more steady, grounded, and effective we become in the world.

And this is where our priestess path widens beyond the personal, because a regulated nervous system doesn’t just serve us — it steadies the collective around us.

LOVE as Coherence

I saw a post this week that really moved me to my core.

It was a group of people singing together in Minneapolis. They were standing outside a hotel where ICE agents were staying, and they were singing:

“We walk the same ground

But we’ve been torn apart

Put down your weapons

Come sing your part ”

It stopped me in my tracks- and made me weep. Tears softly streaming down my cheeks I must have watched it 5 times in a row…

100’s of poeple all standing in the brutal cold calling forth humanity, being love.

And I felt it in my body when I watched it. I felt my nervous system open and soften..and I thought YES that — right there — is soft and strong.

That’s what it looks like when people are regulated enough to stay human. When the nervous system isn’t hijacked. When presence is still online.

A nervous system choosing love as coherence.

This is the skill the Magdalene carried, the capacity to stay coherent in the midst of violence, to remain present without hardening, to choose love as a grounded, embodied stance.

This is our work now.

To view the beauty of this go here: Singing Resistance

The Moment We Are Living In

And as you may have noticed - if you are not hiding under a rock the astrology is mirroring this, beautifully and powerfully.

We’re moving through a month of big thresholds and turning points — real endings braided with beginnings. February is one of the most astrologically charged months of the whole of 2026!

Neptune has just entered Aries, beginning the birth of the spiritual warrior. I am sure that I am not the only one feeling this!

Uranus stations direct in Taurus on February 3, marking a final awakening turn in a cycle that began back in 2018. Think back to what was unfolding then. The #MeToo movement was breaking into the open, long-suppressed truths about women’s bodies, power, consent, and safety surfacing in catalytic ways. I remember being at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and feeling the intensity and extraordinary power of that collective moment. At the same time, a deeper sense of uncertainty was setting in — trust in institutions was fraying, and the social fabric was already beginning to strain.

And then came the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, a moment that reverberated around the world as people rose up against racialized violence and injustice. Shortly after, the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped our lived reality in ways we’re still absorbing.

And now, on the other end of this Uranus cycle, we are witnessing more loss that has ignited national outrage and protest — the fatal shootings of Renée Good on January 7, 2026, and Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026, by ICE in Minneapolis.

And now, before we go on take a breath with me. Let’s regulate together. Let’s practice right now before you take anything else in. How are you? Check your body. Move it, shake it, whatever it needs. Remember to stay grounded… it is a lot.

Taurus governs the body, the Earth, and what we rely on for stability. When Uranus entered this sign, it began a slow unraveling of what was never truly sustainable — not all at once, but steadily, over time.

What we are completing now is the integration of that awakening in the body. This is an initiation for us as modern-day priestesses, learning how to stay regulated, resourced, and rooted while the old world unravels.

The truths that began surfacing then have continued to ripple through our lives and nervous systems, asking us to find new ways of grounding and resourcing ourselves from the inside out.

This isn’t about returning to how things were. It’s about learning how to stand, embodied and present, in what’s emerging.

Saturn moves into Aries on February 13, followed by a Solar Eclipse in Aquarius on February 17, and then the Saturn–Neptune conjunction on February 20.

It’s liminal territory. Old realities are now dissolving. New forms are not yet solid.

And of course that can feel disorienting. Anxiety-producing. Even destabilizing — especially with all this Aquarian energy stirring the mind, the future, the collective nervous system. There’s a lot in the air right now. A lot of mental noise. A lot of future-freak-out. I know I have been feeling this…

But here’s the anchor I keep coming back to.

Come back to your heart. Your amazing beautiful regulated heart.

When the mind spins into past and future, the heart brings us back into now. And now is the only place from which love can actually act.

Our Nervous System

When we are living in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, our nervous system is in survival mode. According to the work of Stephen Porges, when the nervous system is organized around threat, the parts of us responsible for empathy, creativity, perspective, and connection go offline.

Our world shrinks. Our reactions speed up. Our hearts close — emotionally and physiologically. We lose access to long-range vision and deeper meaning.

And when enough of us are dysregulated, the collective field shifts. Coherence doesn’t just live in the individual nervous system — it ripples outward.

And honestly… isn’t this what we’re seeing play out all around us right now? So many people walking around dysregulated, reactive, exhausted. Because when we’re living like that, it’s much easier to keep us spinning, divided, and worn down.

Which is why choosing to champion our nervous-system regulation isn’t small or self-focused. It’s an act of loving resistance — a way of staying human, open, and awake in the midst of it all.

This is spiritual maturity — choosing coherence not just for ourselves, but because our regulated presence stabilizes the field around us.

When the nervous system is regulated, something very different becomes possible. We can feel grief without drowning in it. We can stay open without burning out. We can respond from heart and inherent values rather than urgency.

This is why self-care right now isn’t indulgent.

It’s capacity-building for love.

It’s how we stay available — to life, to each other, to what’s trying to be born through us.

So let me offer this as a gentle invitation for us…

Five ways to champion your nervous system right now:

These aren’t self-help tips. They are priestess skills — ways of training the nervous system to remain coherent, so love can move through us and into the collective.

1. Choose your inputs with care.
   This isn’t just about limiting how much you take in — it’s about how and from where you’re taking it in. Be mindful of your sources. Notice what consistently leaves you more informed versus more inflamed.

   And just as important, notice the state you’re in when you engage. Are you already grounded and regulated, or already stretched thin? Coming to the news, social media, or difficult information from a regulated place makes a real difference.

   Our feelings matter. Grief, anger, heartbreak — all of it belongs. But what’s equally important is having a way to discharge what gets activated, rather than carrying it in the body until it tips us into dysregulation.

   Sometimes that looks as simple as taking a walk, gently shaking the body, making sound, or breathing a few slow, conscious breaths to let the charge move through instead of lodging inside.

2. Come back into the body, every day.
   This is about more than just noticing sensation — it’s about rebuilding a felt sense of safety and pleasure in the body. Begin simply: feet on the earth, breath in the belly, hand on the heart. These small gestures orient the nervous system back into the present moment.

   And then go a step further. Ask yourself what would feel genuinely good right now — not in a numbing way, but in a nourishing one. Warmth. Stretching. Movement. Touch. A moment of pleasure or ease. Pleasure is not frivolous; it’s regulating. It reminds the body that life is still happening, that joy and resilience are still available.

   Even a minute or two of embodied comfort or enjoyment can shift the nervous system out of vigilance and into enough safety to keep the heart open.

3. Let beauty regulate you.
   This isn’t about aesthetics or making things “pretty.” It’s about letting your nervous system soften in the presence of something life-giving. Music. Singing. Candlelight. Nature. Beauty reaches places in us that words and analysis can’t.

   When we allow ourselves to be moved by beauty, the body relaxes, the breath deepens, and the heart opens a little more. Beauty signals safety. It reminds the nervous system that goodness still exists, even alongside grief.

   This isn’t a luxury — it’s a resource its one of the simplest ways to restore coherence and remember why staying open matters.

4. Notice obligation versus aliveness.
   This is an honest, compassionate inquiry. Where are you saying yes from pressure, habit, or fear of disappointing others, rather than from genuine vitality? Over time, living from obligation quietly drains our life force and narrows our capacity to stay open.

   Aliveness, on the other hand, has a very particular feel in the body. It brings a little more breath, a little more warmth, a sense of expansion rather than contraction. Let your body help you discern.

   This week, let aliveness be your compass — even in small ways. One softened no, one true yes, can make a real difference in how resourced you feel.

5. Stay relational.
   We are not meant to do this alone. Even the strongest nervous systems regulate better in the presence of others. Walk with someone. Share tea. Sit together without needing to fix or solve anything.

   Being with another regulated body helps our own system settle. This is what’s called co-regulation — and it’s one of the most powerful medicines we have.

   There is tremendous power in finding those who you can co-regulate with - my dogs are amazing for this! Connection reminds us that we belong, that we are held in something larger than our individual fear or effort.

This is capacity-building.

Staying soft and strong in love doesn’t mean feeling everything all at once. It means staying resourced enough to keep our hearts open.

The world need us to be present, anchored, able to sing together in the dark without losing ourselves.

This is how we walk as love now, not by hardening, not by disappearing, but by tending the hearth of the heart, again and again, so the fire can keep burning.

This is how we can meet this moment and serves in these times - not by carrying everything, but by staying coherent enough to be a steady presence in the world.

I’m here with you tea in hand. Breathing. Listening.

Choosing love …

One regulated moment at a time.

in such love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

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I keep finding myself longing for somewhere to gather my thoughts — not to tidy them up, not to turn them into teachings straight away, but to let them live together. The questions, the memories, the moments that stop me in my tracks. The things I’m living, feeling, walking through.

So much of my work happens in zoom rooms and temples where I’m holding others. Teaching. Guiding. Offering language. And I love that. But underneath it, there’s this quieter current — my own inner conversation about what it actually means to walk this path. To live as a modern-day priestess in the world. To walk the Magdalene path not as an idea, but as a lived devotion.

This space is for that conversation.

It’s a place to come and sit with me — around the fire, cup of tea in hand — and talk about what it really means to walk as love. Not in some abstract, elevated way, but in the body. In relationships. In grief. In beauty. In the middle of the world as it is.

What does it mean to stand as love?
To speak as love?
To move through daily life as a woman devoted to presence, truth, and compassion?

I don’t have neat answers. What I have is lived experience, attention, and a willingness to stay with the questions. And this feels like the right place to let those reflections land.

This is a home for my temple letters, pieces of writing that come from inside my life as it’s unfolding. It’s also a home for the Red Podcast, for audio reflections where you can hear my voice, my pauses, my breath, an intimacy just spoken from where I am.

It’s a place for memoir, musings, deeper thoughts. For impressions that arrive quietly and don’t want to be rushed. For the things that don’t always fit into social media, or even into teaching spaces, but still matter.

More than anything, I want this to feel intimate.

I’m yearning for that kind of connection, the kind where we’re not performing, not consuming, not trying to be impressive or certain. I find myself weary of the need to keep producing content to be “relevant”. I want to be honest, present, willing to feel what’s real.

I imagine this as a kind of community temple space. A place where we can feel connected to one another, even if we’re all sitting in different rooms, in different lives, at different thresholds.

If you’re here, I imagine you already know something about this path — or at least feel its pull. You may be standing at an edge in your own life. Feeling called into deeper embodiment, deeper integrity, deeper love, without quite knowing what that looks like yet.

You’re welcome here.

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This is a place to breathe together.
To remember together.
To speak honestly about what it means to live this devotion in real time.

Just a fire, a few words, and the shared act of staying present.

What I’m hoping this becomes, over time, is a temple space in the truest sense.
A place you can return to, again and again, and feel the same quality of presence waiting for you.

A place shaped by the Magdalene path, not as an ideal, or a myth we admire from a distance, but as a lived practice of walking as love. Of choosing tenderness when it would be easier to harden. Of staying rooted in the body, the heart, the breath, even when the world feels fractured or frightening.

I want this to be a place where we talk honestly about what that asks of us. What it costs. What it gives. How it changes the way we stand in the world, the way we speak, the way we love, the way we listen.

A place where the modern-day priestess isn’t an archetype we dress up as, but a way of being we practice imperfectly, devotionally, one step at a time.

This isn’t about becoming something extraordinary.
It’s about becoming more real.

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And the way I’ll share here reflects that.

Mostly, you’ll receive words temple letters written slowly, from inside lived experience. Pieces that arrive because something is moving, or asking to be named, or wants to be witnessed. Sometimes they’ll be longer, sometimes they’ll be brief. Always they’ll be close to the bone.

Alongside the writing, I’ll share audio reflections spoken in my own voice, often in the same way I’d speak to you if we were sitting together. No script. No performance. Just presence, breath, and whatever feels true in that moment.

Some things are meant to be read.
Some things are meant to be heard.

I want this space to hold both.

You won’t be inundated. I’m not interested in filling your inbox. I’m interested in offering something you can actually receive. Something that lands, that stays with you, that maybe opens a quiet door inside.

Sometimes what’s offered here will be open and shared freely. Sometimes it will be held in a closer circle, for those who want to step nearer to the fire. Not because it’s better or more special — just because intimacy changes the way we speak.

At the heart of it, this is an invitation into relationship.

A relationship with yourself.
With your own inner knowing.
With the deeper current of love that the Magdalene path keeps pointing us toward.

If you’re here, I trust that you already feel that current in some way — even if you don’t yet have language for it. Even if you’re still learning how to live it.

This is a place to practice together.
To sit. To listen. To remember.
To walk gently, courageously as love.

You’re welcome to come as you are.

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