Messy, Luminous, Being Podcast

For those who visit the Oracle, she shares tales in the Old Language, tales that weave their way into your bones and have the power to transform. She stands at the threshold of her white stone house above the silver mangroves and against the towering cliffs of her indigo island. She is waiting to tell you this next story…the tale of the hungry ghosts...  * A new year's gift...Enjoying the Oracle's...

The Oracle's Tales is a novella of magical stories and spells of wisdom. The oracle is a healer, and most come to her for help with their physical ailments. But this is not the oracle's true calling. The oracle is a healing of the suffering of the mind. In this third chapter, the oracle tells you the Tale of the Wild Horses.  "You have come here," she says, "thinking of yourself as an ordinary per...

The Oracle speaks tales in the Old Language, tales that weave their way into your bones and have the power to transform. And if you dared to visit the her at her home by the cliff, what tale do you think she would tell you? Once there was, and once there was not and once there will be again, a young girl who dreamed that she stood before a long path that was littered with flecks of gold... Listen...

If you dared to visit the Oracle, what would she tell you? The Oracle's Tales is novella of magical stories and spells of wisdom. The oracle is a healer, and most islanders come to her for help with their physical ailments. But this is not the oracle's true calling. The oracle is a healer of the suffering of the mind… For those who visit, she speaks tales in the Old Language, tales that weave thei...

As we come into the beginning of winter, how can we align our busy outer lives with our inner desire to slow down, curl up and rest? How do the energies of this season invite us to shift our inner practices like yoga or meditation? And what lies waiting for us, if we allow ourselves to really descend with this yin energy? In this episode, I talk to Marit Akintewe about seasonal yoga and the differ...

"You will never believe or surrender to any thought that is not equal to the way your body feels." This is a powerful truth, and the thing that makes mindset work really hard. Sometimes we genuinely can't shift our mindset because our body is stuck in a totally different vibe. In this episode, I talk about how to work with our experience of embodiment and take the body along with us on our inner j...

The benefits of mindfulness and meditation are promoted everywhere. So why aren't we all sitting? In this episode, I talk with mindfulness teacher Aiko Smith about the invisible standards we're all trying to live up to and the political and cultural reasons why we can't sit in stillness. We also discuss the forgotten power of community practice and how Aiko's own life experience made her look in t...

Heading out on a walk, I started thinking about the many ways I practice mind-calming and all the ups-and-downs-and sideways realities of having a long term meditation practice when you live in messy real life. So this episode is a chat, along a woodland walk and with a few startled pheasants, about how I'm thinking about meditation now after many years of weaving it in alongside life with kids, w...

Softening our self-critical voice, feeling love for ourselves when we have a human moment, and the evolving journey of meditation practice in messy real life...these are just a few of the illuminating moments in my conversation with Elena Brower, poet, Zen practitioner, mother and creative soul. Elena shares a gorgeous reframe on what life can be as a woman beyond the age of 50, and profoundly imp...

Imagine your future self, a person you are moving towards through the landscape of time. Our tendency can often be to get caught up in this week, this day, just getting through. But what would happen if we adopted a radical new mindset, one that goes against our culture of reacting only when something has gone wrong? What if we cultivated a mindset and lifestyle that focused on how we are taking c...

The energy of plants and the living world is reflected within us. In this beautiful conversation with the wise and wonderful Lucy Jones, we talk about the meaning of self-sufficiency and personal sovereignty, plant medicine, intuition and the health journey we are all on with our bodies. Growing herbs in a small patch in her garden from the age of 8, Lucy trained in both Western herbal medicine an...

We are evolving beings, meant to grow and learn and change. This episode is about the gritty, non-linear process of our efforts to step into the next version of ourselves and what we have to overcome in the process. Overcoming old versions of ourselves is something we have to do physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. Yet sometimes along our life journey a portal opens and the call to st...

Our physical bodies are the lens through which we experience life. So how we take care of our health can completely change the life we think we are experiencing! In this episode, I wanted to share my latest adventures in wellness...from a summer of eating oreos to few new shifts that are making me feel a thousand times better both physically and mentally.  If you enjoy this episode, give it wings...

Journeying into unseen places, spirit guides and imagination as the driver of spiritual practice. What a beautiful conversation in this episode with Rhonda McCrimmon who talks with me about Celtic Shamanism, the power of listening and her own everyday efforts to embody spiritual practice in messy real life. You can connect with Rhonda on IG @centreforshamanism and online at centreforshamanism.com

We all have a face that we show to the world. An avatar of ourselves that we present outward. But the secret we all share without really acknowledging it, is that we are all also carrying so much behind the scenes. And our experience of our inner self doesn't always match the outward self everyone sees. This episode is a wandering conversation with me about the messy realities of our search for in...

There is something I think we're all looking for...and that is a life that elevates us beyond the small self and into the most true and beautiful version of who we really are. A life where this connection to our deeper self is woven into every day. A life where we create and accumulate moments of illumination. This episode shares the method behind my own spiritual practice in messy real life. Mome...

Our bodies are the holders of ancestral knowledge, ancestral feelings, ancestral wounds. In this episode, Tara Wild shares her journey with feminine ancestral teachings from Ireland and Britain, how we can heal our lineage and ways we all embody a place in the lineage. We are also ancestors. Tara's journey began living in London when she felt a deep call of the land and a desire to come back into...

Come take a few minutes to remember yourself, to come back home. To remind yourself of what you've always known. This is where your energy really comes from, this place inside of you. This is where your true power is.

There are so many inner practices to choose from and work with.  In this episode, Sarah shares her reflections on a through-line which feels like the foundation of them all. Self-love has become a complex word and we all have different associations with it. Yet the reality is, we're still not very good at *doing* it. It feels like this through-line is also the basis of deep and true self-love. May...

In this episode, Sarah shares her reflections on the importance of stepping away and finding space for just ourselves. Integrating practice into messy real life is such a journey. But there are times we can also take ourselves on pilgrimage...for a walk, for a day, or for a bit longer...and rediscover ourselves in solitude.

When we are surrounded by man-made environments, it can be hard to remember that we ourselves are not man-made. We are beautifully wild. And that's why stepping out into nature, whether on a walk you do everyday, into your back garden, or into the wilds of the 'loneliest glen in scotland' (where I recorded this episode) can be a powerful reminder of the incredible living force inside of us and who...

My son told me recently that the reason he likes to climb mountains is because at the top, you can really hear 'the great nothing'. My whole being stopped when he said that, because I know exactly what he means. The deep, expansive space. The great quiet that also lies within us. This is a fertile space. A stillness that speaks. And when we learn to quiet the noise of our mind, we can find it.   T...

The deep value of practice, learning how to stablise our inner Witness, the revelancy of traditional yoga teachings to modern life and so much more. In this episode I talk to Marit Akintewe, advanced yoga teacher and director of Seasonal Yoga in Edinburgh. Come sit with us as we spiral through the seasons, yoga tradition and into ourselves. You can find Marit on IG @seasonalyogaedinburgh and onlin...

Challenges in our life are inevitable. We have been taught to wish for calm seas and smooth sailing in life, but the truth is, it is often the challenges that bring us the opportunity for deeper transformation. This episode is about how to shift our mindset around our 'problems' and use them as soil for becoming wiser, more authentic versions of ourselves.   For your own cup of delicious Cacao, he...

Presence alone is healing. No one tells us this. We are taught that in order to heal our bodies, our minds, our relationship, we have to 'do' something more. Yet so often, the most powerful medicine we can give ourselves is Attentive Stillness. In this episode, Sarah talks about the meaning of effortless effort (wu wei), the power of our attention and how we can use simple attention or observation...