METAMORPHOSIS

Extraordinarily magnetic, unshakeable, creative and feeling completely supported and delighted by life: this is our natural state as human beings!  The reason that so many of us don't feel this for the vast majority of our lives is because our modern society has flipped our natural polarity.  Our heads and minds are so, so dense and heavy.  Our power house in our lower abdomen has no gravity,...

It’s been a while since I recoded a podcast episode about life lessons from Kalari, so here we go!  I have had 3 main injuries so far, 5.5 months into the Kalaripayattu diploma - and each of them has forced me to confront something about myself, specifically related to the injury itself but also in a much broader sense of my own life and character!  The first injury was my knee (all kalaripayattu...

I don’t know about you, but my social media and YouTube is FULLLLL of ‘quantum leaping’ and ‘timeline shifting’ videos - secret methods, tips and hacks promising to teleport you into the most evolved and radiant version of yourself. I’m using these terms kind of ironically, because of course in principle, quantum leaping is easy, all you have to do is behave differently than how you normally behav...

'Hustling' has been well and truly cancelled, and if your Instagram feed is like mine then every second post is something about 'nervous system regulation'. A big problem happens when we get stuck between these two things, because this wonderful state of 'ease and flow' that we would all love to experience actually comes from a state of mastery, which comes from spending th...

If you're not a gamer (I'm not either!), let me introduce you to the idea of an 'NPC': An NPC is a 'non-player character', they normally populate the background of video games to make the game world feel alive. They generally follow pre-written scripts, repeat the same phrases, and walk in predictable, repetitive patterns. If you look around you in real life, you'll fin...

“Maybe I need to tone it down...” There is absolutely NO way!!!!!  If this thought ever crosses your mind, you must delete it immediately.  It is an absolutely criminal ideal that you should dim your wild, glorious spark (which by the way is trying SO HARD to stay alive and aflame) in order to fit in with what everyone else around you thinks is ‘normal’ and ‘appropriate’.  Normal and appropriate a...

Ok block your ears discipline-haters… In shocking news, extreme discipline actually has EXTREMELY potent side effects in your life!  It is just categorically true that doing difficult things on purpose makes all of your life easier. And I’m doing my own experiment on myself - training Kalaripayattu in India for 5 hours per day, not one single day off since January 15. No matter what - no matter my...

YOU ARE GIFTED ! Extremely gifted, even. Even if you don’t feel like it. Even if you’re not sure what they are or how to use them. Your gifts will be different to mineDifferent to everyone else around youAnd that’s how it’s supposed to be! How dull would life be if we were all carbon copies of each other… and yet somehow that’s exavctly what we spend so much time and energy trying to do! This epis...

“Just listen to your body”… but HOW?!!  How many times have we heard ‘just be in the now’, ‘just focus on the breath’, only to be distracted literally one second later and feeling like there must be something wrong with us. The problem is that our monkey minds are sooo good at hijacking the show! And our bodies speak quietly, and not in words. We think we feel something, and 3 seconds later our mi...

I already knew this I already knew this 2 year Kalaripayattu diploma was going to be an adventure of a lifetime. So I decided to make it into an experiment to see how deeply I could tap into the disciplined, devoted, focused version of Rae. I committed to myself to attend every single training session, every single day. It’s been 3 months of this experiment now, and I have learned that above all e...

Life has this very beautiful way of giving us EXACTLY what we need to evolve to our next level.  Sometimes we call these ‘tests’, and when we think that when we fail the tests we have to live them over and over until we ‘learn the lesson’. But in actual fact, it’s just progressive overload, exactly like when you go to the gym!  We learn incrementally, and we’re given opportunities over and over to...

Waiting to feel ‘Ready’ is one of the most sneaky tricks our mind plays on us! It keeps us in a place of contrived ‘safety’, it feels productive to allow ourselves to just a bit more planning, just a bit more time, just a few more lists, just one more book, just a bit more savings. But as the wonderful Rumi said: “as you start to walk on the way, the way appears”. As we jump, so we find our wings!...

OK WARRIOR BABES! We all know that doing the same old thing as everyone else is doing, and doing the same old thing you've always done is not going to cut it for the kind of metamorphosis you're ready for. We all know how excruciating it is to keep circling the same old threshold over and over and over again, to start and then stop, to know you're made for so much more but somehow not...

I got a long, beautiful voice note from a very dear friend and past client of mine last week reflecting on the episode about the 4 stages of metamorphosis, and one thing she shared really touched my heart because I have felt it so much too! There is often a lottttt of loneliness in certain stages of the metamorphosis journey, ESPECIALLY in the cocoon and in the dissolution. Even though this obviou...

Birthdays are always a reflective time, and I've turned 36 at the start of a new 36 year astrological cycle, so that prompted me to connect to 72 year old Rae! At 36 I am the strongest, most disciplined, most connected to myself version of me that I have ever been in my entire life, and this feels like only the beginning! There is one very specific mindset that MUST be deleted from our collect...

How do we know when it is the right moment to go deeper into the cocoon, and when is it the right time to fly out and experience more novelty?! How to combat this collective vortex of a feeling that we are running out of time and need to be a mad rush to squeeze everything in?! How to trust the flow between novelty and the cocoon, understanding that they can only exist with the other in a perfect...

There comes a moment when your old life no longer responds to you. The strategies that once worked stop working, the roles you once played feel false. The performance becomes unbearable. This is the threshold - the very first phase of metamorphosis. Most people get stuck circling this point again and again, because they want to skip the next two phases: the cocoon and the dissolution. But metamorp...

I get lots of questions about how I organise my day and life around training 5 hours per day - studying a 2 year diploma of Kalaripayattu in India. Here's a walk-through of my day starting at 4am every morning, exploring the things I do to support my body, what I eat, how I train, and some big lessons for me along the way! There have been some big challenges, a lot of lessons and a lot of beautifu...

Someone asked me after the afternoon kalari class the other day: "Does it ever get easier?!". And funnily enough, I had just been thinking during that class 'wow it really doesn't get easier'. The best thing about the fact that it doesn't get easier though??? You get STRONGER! You get more flexible, more focused, more resilient, more capable, more fluid, more powerful. This episode explores some d...

You need a cocoon!! Because otherwise in your process of transformation and metamorphosis, you end up as a caterpillar dissolving into a thousand little puddles of goo in a thousand different places - which is exactly what you don’t want. What you DO want is an extraordinary sense of self-gravity, an unshakeable knowing of your own self and an unshakeable sense of trust in yourself. And to do that...

Anyone who has been in my world for a hot minutes knows I am obsessed with Kalaripayattu - the mother of all martial arts! I discovered this beautiful Indian sword-fighting martial art 2 years ago while I was living in Sri Lanka, and never imagined then that I would commit to doing a 2 year diploma to dive deeeeep into this practice. 5 hours of training per day, no days off , living in India and o...

We are all absolutely drowning in information and advice, jumping frantically from one 6 week course to the next, one podcast to the next, one book to the next. Our phones full of screenshots of advice from social media, recipes, workouts, astrology tips, supplements and on and on endlessly. Maybe this other person will have the answers? Maybe that new book, maybe that retreat, maybe that guru?  W...

Let me say straight off the bat - Chat GPT is obviously an extraordinary tool. And this episode is just purely my own observations of my own self and my own life, so take it all with a grain of salt and an opportunity to reflect on something almost completely habitual nowadays! But in a world of endless ‘optimisation’ and homogenisation, it was a surprise and a pleasure to re-discover the joy of b...

It’s an uncomfortable sensation, the feeling of being ‘bad’ at something. And I especially have never loved the feeling of being ‘bad’ at meditation! It has been something I’ve been endlessly curious about, ever since reading The Power of Now in my early teenage years. I became obsessed with the idea of the present moment, and finding what seemed like it should be a feeling of emptiness or a vacuu...

One of the most delightful parts of travelling so much is that I get to meet a lot of new people! And some of those new people I meet have a very inspiring, illuminating approach to living life. Julien is one of those people! We met in Auroville where my brother and I were staying in the same guest house for 5 weeks or so, and the three of us got to share lots of coffees, dinners, meditations in t...