An Illusion of Time

Psychology Cannot Replace Lineage

Psychology Cannot Replace Lineage Have a listen to our recent Mother of the Sword Podcast exploring these themes that feel fiery as I personally dive into a restructuring of my own body, heart, mind and body of work. Read on for an essay connected to the pod. TY to Jeff from Cosmic Cousins [https://www.cosmiccousins.com] for editing this pod and yay they are going to be on the next one coming out this Saturday! Most people I know right now want support making money. Given the economy, and how capitalism wires our sense safety to what we can get and produce alone…that makes complete sense. We live inside a culture that tells us if we have enough money, we’ll finally feel safe, mentally, emotionally, and physiologically. There is truth in that. Financial stability matters. It’s one of the reasons I help people examine their relationship with money, create offerings that are sustainable, and move beyond constant hustle into a life that includes vision, planning, and meaningful action. But alongside that work, I can’t ignore the deeper hunger I see everywhere. A hunger that money cannot touch. A desire to relate to Truth within, to care that can touch the grief that does not go away. A path of admitting animism is just as real as accolades. I believe we are arriving at a moment where pathology and psychology—particularly the pathology that emerges from a Western psychological framework—cannot replace lineage. This isn’t a rejection of psychology. I’ve spent eleven years in Jungian analysis with the same therapist, and it has transformed my life. It gave language to experiences that otherwise would have remained unconscious. It taught me boundaries in relationship. It helped me survive. I’ve also witnessed medication and diagnosis save lives, helping people navigate unbearable suffering with greater choice and stability. And yet there are experiences that psychology cannot fully translate. There are moments of grief, ecstasy, devotion, trance, communion, and altered consciousness that become diminished the moment we reduce them solely to physiological or psychological events. Throughout most of human history, these experiences were never understood as isolated symptoms. They were held inside living traditions—supported by elders, songs, myths, initiation rites, cosmologies, and communities that knew how to accompany someone through mystery instead of immediately explaining it away. Today we breathe together, dance together, regulate together, and something ancient wakes up. People remember belonging. They remember God. They remember their bodies. Something profoundly real happens. But filtered through a culture obsessed with productivity, optimization, and individual achievement, these experiences are immediately translated into something else. Instead of asking, How does this change my relationship to my community? we ask, How can I monetize this? Instead of wondering, Who can help me integrate this over the coming years? we ask, How do I recreate this feeling next weekend? Ritual becomes another product. Transformation becomes another performance. The nervous system becomes another thing to perfect. Just as yoga was extracted from thousands of years of devotional, philosophical, and communal context to become another wellness commodity, I believe somatics is now walking the same line. The practices themselves remain powerful, but without roots they become vulnerable to misunderstanding. A healthy dissolution of the ego inside ritual can be mistaken for pathology. Pathology itself can become romanticized as spiritual awakening. Without mature cultural containers capable of distinguishing these experiences, we swing between over-pathologizing and over-spiritualizing, unable to hold the nuance that real transformation requires. Healing communities that cannot survive conflict, grief, ambiguity, disappointment, repair, and longing often recreate the very childhood dynamics they hope to heal. Tenderness is essential, but initiation also asks something of us. Safety isn’t the absence of rupture. Sometimes safety is what is rebuilt because we have the capacity to stay present through it. For centuries, women, queer people, mystics, and devotees who entered ecstatic states of prayer or grief were labeled irrational, hysterical, or possessed. Even now, there is discomfort around encounters with mystery that refuse rational explanation. We rush to interpret rather than participate. We diagnose instead of witnessing. I’m not suggesting we abandon psychology. I’m not romanticizing the past. I’m asking us to remember that psychology cannot replace lineage. It cannot replace ritual. It cannot replace community. It cannot replace a cosmology that understands human beings as more than isolated individuals seeking symptom reduction. Body Temple Dance™is a ritual pedagogy that understands the nervous system as inseparable from beauty, devotion, Goddess, relationship, creativity, ecology, and collective ritual. Ritual as the deliberate shaping of attention through embodied action in order to transform relationship. (We are leading an in person training in Spain September 1-8 and tonight the early rate ends - we have 3 more spaces.) [https://www.bodytemple.church/btd-teacher-training] Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe [https://bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

POSSESSED: Sex, Money, and Survival That Devours Us

Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe [https://bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Truth is Erotic but Intimacy is Awkward

“The Truth is Erotic.” - Ginny Muir [https://www.ginnymuir.com] As much as we crave connection, I can assure you as a guide to the realms of intimacy it is awkward and full of tears and snots too. Are you also wondering how to relate to men (forever) but now more than ever in ways that feel nurturing and soul enriching? Yeah, us too. Across cultures, women’s and folks with vulvas bodies have been shaped by systems that regulate sexuality, emotional expression, and spiritual authority. But as devotees to the Shameless Goddess, we know we are here for something more. Join Ginny Muir [https://www.ginnymuir.com]and I in this episode of Mother of the Sword to explore the themes of intimacy, right relationship and how to get what we fucking want and deserve, when it comes to loving. Ginny has a program for all lovers if your wanting support in partnership get over here. [https://www.ginnymuir.com/the-lovers-collective] Tomorrow Thursday April 2nd holds the full moon in the Indian mystical traditions called Hanuman Jayanti. Hanuman is the blessed lord of devotion, and my Dark Mother initiation is connected to his Mother and her temples on Anjaneri Hill in India. More on that some other time. Today’s episode and writing is a big dose of devotion today, after a much needed break for me. Have a read and then listen to our interview on a walk to move some energy relationally. Religious doctrine, colonial morality, and patriarchal medical frameworks have historically positioned female erotic intelligence as something to be controlled, silenced, or pathologized. One result of this long history is the pervasive presence of shame within the body, particularly within the pelvis, where sexuality, instinct, and creativity converge. Intimacy, for some of us, was never meant to be casual terrain. It was always going to be an underworld journey. Especially those of us on the Rose path, reclaiming a God that has a vagina and a more embodied sense of Spirituality and a life devoted to being of service to feeling more, not less. Ty to Audre Lorde for her immense contribution on the subject of the erotic and to Jeff from Cosmic Cousins for editing the pod go check out their astrology offerings! https://www.cosmiccousins.com/jeff-hinshaw [https://www.cosmiccousins.com/jeff-hinshaw] Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe [https://bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Jesus Sex Dreams, My First Threesome and The Mother's Waters

For more Magdalene magic meet us over at www.bodytemple.church! When everything else fell away, when I left the father’s house, when the myth cracked and the spell broke and the bill came due — what remained was what had always been there: The Mother’s waters. Mouths watering. Home. Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe [https://bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

What's More Powerful Than a Daddy?

“Shiva without Shakti is a corpse.” -Laura Ammazonne As a massively femme oriented being, I get that discipline can not only be a turn off, but enraging. I am all about the primal, pre-dogma and religious authorities type of spirituality and embodiment. But being in spaces where there is so much devotion oriented to the unseen and to being of service to humanity, I find a simultaneous kink around being told what to do and when to do it. the Difference is in the consent I have created within myself. And a new view on discpline. Discipline as being a disciple to Love. Authority, as we were taught it, was a clenched jaw, a spine held so tight it forgot how to listen, a voice that barked orders instead of tracking sensation. I am no longer interested in authority as control. I am interested in authority as collapse—the holy kind. The kind where you fall backward into the arms of the Divine and discover you were never meant to push your life forward at all. This is where my re-writing begins: not from effort, not from domination of self, but from listening so deeply the body becomes a tuning fork for truth. Most of us carry what I call boundary ruptures—moments where our no was ignored, where we learned to override our instincts to belong, survive, or be loved. Authority entered our nervous systems not as safety, but as threat. So we learned to submit, rebel, or dissociate. Rarely did we learn how to receive guidance without collapse, or how to lead without violence. Repairing boundary ruptures is not about harder edges or better performance. It is about restoring trust with the intelligence of the body. It is about letting the Divine speak through sensation instead of through shame, punishment, or spiritual striving. I am writing this from the sacred portal of Mother India—another dimension entirely—where reverence looks like a million different things and is felt not as obedience, but as shared joy. Here, devotion is not abstract. It is touchable. Audible. In the air. It lives in the excess of color, the chaos, the song, the tears, the laughter. It is an ecstatic devotion to Love itself, recognizable only to those who feel it in their bones. For the ones who get it, no explanation is needed. Devotion is felt. This is the authority I met years ago inside pre-religious mystical ritual with the Dark Goddess in India and again in Italy—before doctrine, before temples with rules, before God was turned into a father with conditions. There, authority was rhythm, drum, breath, voice cracking open. No hierarchy, only initiation by listening. The ritual did not command us; it waited for us to soften enough to hear it. The Goddess did not ask for obedience. She asked for attunement. And when we listened—truly listened—our lives reorganized themselves without force. To be a good leader, you must be a good servant—but I do not mean a servant to systems of oppression, productivity, or control, and I do not mean a servant to the dominant culture’s version of success. I mean a servant to something wider and more wild than yourself. A servant to eros, to truth, to the collective nervous system, to the living intelligence that moves through bodies, land, and time. Leadership, from this place, is not about directing others. It is about being so devoted to listening that others feel safe enough to hear themselves. This Capricorn New Moon, I am not interested in climbing another mountain or mastering another structure. I am interested in leasing my life up from beneath me—from the deep ground of devotion. From the place where discipline becomes reverence, responsibility becomes responsiveness, and authority is no longer a weapon but a sanctuary. True authority does not push. It receives the next instruction from the dark, fertile silence where God is not an idea, but a pulse moving through bone. This is where I begin again. We don’t just speak and write about the Divine Feminine over here in Body Temple, We embody Her. Come to France with us for a writing and womb healing embodied love and grief, Mary Magdalene and Black Madonna retreat in April. Taurus season. Find info and apply here. [https://www.bodytemple.church/marseille-pilgrimage-2026] Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe [https://bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]