About.

The Short Story:

The Radiant Story is about the relevance of powerful feminine archetypes in our present-day lives, and the fascinating progression that brings their stories and potencies into our felt experience. It explores the practices and rituals that give us access to these modes of consciousness and allow us to live them in vivid and meaningful ways.

I invite you to let these diverse images of feminine power in, to relate to and resource them, so that they can transform the way you reflect on and re-author the stories of your own life.

The Long Story:

We often learn through moments of recognition, when we connect something outside - an image, a story, a phrase  - with an internal understanding. The outer 'lights up' the inner and strikes a chord that feels like truth. 

Some of the most potent moments of recognition feel less like revelation and more like remembrance. They vibrate at the core of our being, awaken something we forgot, remind us of who we are and where our true potential lies.

So it is with myth, which taps deep into our unconscious and collective memory. Though it plunges us into the realm of feeling and imagination, myth is not about transcending the world, but, in the words of Karen Armstrong, about "enabling us to live more intensely within it." 

The same can be said of feminine archetypes, which are generously encoded with messages about the nature of two elusive qualities - power and wisdom - and how to attain them. They offer keys to becoming a more skilled and adaptable player in a world that often threatens to overwhelm us.  

Myths and other illuminating narratives, what I call 'Radiant Stories' and the archetypes -  the characters, heroines and feminine deities - who populate them, allow us see beyond the tumult and swirl of our individual lives, beyond our fragmented psyches and into a larger truth. 

The Radiant Story is the one lit from within, bright with the wisdom attained when we meet life fully and contemplate it deeply. The 'intensity' it offers is not about stimulation, but aliveness. It is the vitality we feel when edging into aspects of the 'self' we haven't yet explored, seek to transform, or believe we've lost and want to integrate anew.   

The vehicle for this integration is the body.  Encompassing our sensory channels, nervous system, memory and physical form, the body is the is medium through which these stories and images can be felt and experienced 'in the flesh.'

The Radiant Story is writing that teases out the connections between body, narrative and archetype and how these intersections can be known and expressed in the here and now. 

The Personal Story:

For as long as I can remember I had been obsessed with powerful, subversive, adventurous, creative, sexually vital feminine figures, and a lot of my off-duty research was devoted to understanding what they did to keep themselves intact in a world that often tried to break them. 

Studying these figures (who identified as man, woman, both and neither) was a way of pushing back against the crushing tide of one-dimensional, disempowered - and disempowering - models of the feminine that abounded in pop culture and consciously resisting the ways I had internalised them. 

Such models were, in the words of Sylvia Brinton Perera, "inadequate for life," untranslatable into a real and robust existence that included struggle, growth and transformation. I needed models of the feminine that were multi-dimensional, and that embraced big affect and appetite, brutality, desire, intuition, creativity, wisdom, and discernment. 

I found them in esoteric and mystical traditions, buried in pop, sub and counter cultures, in history, fiction, fairy-tales and myth. Identifying them externally allowed me to then identify them as parts and characters living within my own psyche the people I knew. 

Finding them, however, is only the beginning. Great feminine archetypes are oblique, poetical, and will meet us only halfway. 

They require our engagement and imagination. They force us into more magical dimensions, into depths that point us toward the body, toward rapture, and new thresholds. They give everything, but demand everything in return. Most notably, they ask for relationship. Participation. Action. Embodiment. They ask to be lived. 

The longing and recognition and turmoil I still experience when looking at representations of feminine power convince me, over and over again, that I need to unearth her, exalt her - in the world and in myself.