How are you today?
What has been landing for you this week?
For me, it is boundaries!
The SACRED Bowl course opened this week, also marking the launch of the theme of the sacral chakra across both Embodied Alchemy and The Goddxx Path 9-month programmes (both of which have a strong focus on boundaries) and its been a beautiful healing synchronicity, because boundaries have been such a powerful part of my learning this week!
The SACRED Bowl is an evergreen course which offers two twice yearly group hands on (or hands off) meditations and an online course which covers all things sacral chakra including intuition, pleasure, rituals for self care, anatomy and pelvic health, language, boundaries, shadow work, sex magic, pleasure, journalling and more.
And here are a few of the syncronous landings which happened across other areas of my life;
On Sunday last week, I held a trauma informed workshop at Yoga Kula in Leeds, and it really hit home for me how deeply trauma and boundaries are connected and create a cycle of victim and saver that means neither person is holding themselves whole… and how I have in the past sacrificed my identity and removed my boundaries to receive love.
And then a beautiful heart Jo Grace sent this in a group I am in;
“Boundaries usually trigger process: Fear and shame in the boundary placer (fear of consequences/abandonment/survival which activates shame), and can activate the receiver of the boundary into anger, rejection, confusion, which will trigger their own script (“how dare they/no one understands me/is there for me/can’t they see how much more important my needs are?”) This obviously can activate the boundary placer more and ping pong back and forth”
And it all began to land as I encountered more boundary issues with organisations, in friendships and relationships… and I realised that often it becomes a game of unmet childhood needs. I realised how beautiful boundaries can be… that they can allow space for us to hold ourselves with deep compassion. And how, if we make a sacrifice for someone we care about, it needs to be because we want to, not because we ‘have to’ or are scared of what might happen if we don’t have them.
Another beautiful synchronicity is that the show I am creating at The Place for the BA3 with Akeim Toussaint is about different modes of relating, such as co-dependancy, aloofness, controlling, and again, I realised that any behaviour outside of holding ourselves whole is connected to our unmet needs (often from childhood), and as I watched the dancers move, I realised this too was a beautiful comment on all that was unfolding.
Even as I wrote a song for my singing course homework, I reminisced my first kiss, and realised that, even though he actually wasn’t someone I really liked that much, because I had diverted my attention into him, once I began to receive energy from him, my focus got stuck on that and I lost my sense of self and boundaries as a result, setting up an interesting pattern for future relating!
And so I put boundaries in place, I asked others what their boundaries were, and even energetically things changed as someone realised they were underpaying me for my work: such alchemy! And out of all of this I also developed two new tools;
Is it the HOT? Is a tool for checking if something is really true for you (in my experience, when something is not really true, my boundaries become ‘hazy’) and is available on The SACRED Bowl course.
Boundaries Mitigation is a tool for mitigating the recurring conflicts born out of boundary issues so we can continue to learn, unlearn and evolve and is available on my new course to support facilitators to work in a way that is trauma informed.
On Sunday we also launched the last ever episode of PowerUp! Podcast (until Oprah Winfrey sponsors us), and we are closing because it feels like we need to honour our wellbeing by creating the boundary of no more unpaid podcast recordings (no matter how beautiful and uplifting the work!)
So wow!
A lot of alchemy in there this week!
How about you beautiful? Did anything land reading this?
Maya Mentions
Each week I also like to extend my Sparks of JOY to someone in my big global family making magic! This week it is a wonderful human Ruth Asidi, who I have been mentoring as part of Wildfire Rising and her event as part of Cheshire Dance’s timetable is going to be so magical!
The project is a partnership between Movema and Cheshire Dance, the Wildfire Rising Associate Artist Development Programme.
Inquiring Bodies is a full day event by dance artists, for dance artists. Inquiring Bodies feature guest artists who identify as Global Majority who invite others to engage in their current research, the questions they’re asking themselves and their emerging interests.
Inquiring Bodies creates a mutually supportive environment for dance exploration and open dialogue. Sign up HERE