An Invitation.

Spell-Breakers, let’s gather. It’s time.

Recently, I found myself in a conundrum.

As I came close to finishing the second draft of my book, a book that spends a lot of time making a case for the power of the collective, I found myself alone.

Alone as a writer. Alone as someone who has to “publish a book”.

There is nothing wrong with being an author or even publishing a book. It’s part of the deal if you want your thinking to be understood with care and context. Nothing wrong with that.

My issue is that modern people are biased towards individuality. We praise individuals for their uniqueness; we create street names, build monuments that remind us of their titles, but forget what they were working towards. The message is sidelined, often forgotten or projected upon. We put people on pedestals and forget that they are contextual. That their work came from a web of relationships and that without those relationships the work itself becomes a shell of what it was meant to be.

This brings me to the invitation I have for you.

For the past two and a half years, I have been dedicating a lot of my time to writing a book that will, hopefully, help modern women, men, and gender diverse folks understand how sex pretty much in-forms human subjectivity in much deeper ways than we give it credit for.

The book helps us name, see and untangle a spell that has been governing the stories we have been told for generations and now pass on.

The tricky thing is that the spell lands on bodies and cultures differently, making it very difficult to see and undo.

This is where becoming a spell-breaker comes in.

The journey I am inviting you into is to join me and others in breaking the spell together. I have tried to break it on my own, and I can tell you it doesn’t work.

We are collective creatures, raised by stories that require us to divorce ourselves from our bodies and the rhythm of life itself to simply exist. Most of us don’t notice it.

This quote by Erich Fromm says it well:

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

The book “The Matriarch and the Machine: A Spell-Breaking Journey for Modern Women and the World,” focuses on women, but it also reveals that, being collective creatures, if a spell has been “cast” on women, it would obviously affect men as well. It could not be otherwise.

The point of the journey is to re-frame the female experience. To understand the crazy assumptions we have been living under, as women, and what we have been passing on to future generations.

It is a journey that will require us to be both gentle and fierce with ourselves. A journey that will invite us into forming relationships with people who can help us re-frame and re-member long-lost capacities that modernity has atrophied. Especially in women.

This is a pilot journey. It is a journey of trust and collective vulnerability. It is also a journey that will birth this book into the world.

You, who decide to embark on it, will become (if you wish) part of the pool of wisdom, the collective library of stories, that will help future spell-breakers.

When the book, the bones, is published, your stories, the flesh, will give it life. They will be shared either in book form or in a living library. Something to be decided.

The Matriarch is a collective, and she is asleep. The spell is strong, and it has seeped into our lives.

If you feel like being part of this first wave of spell-breakers, become a paid subscriber.

I’ll explain the journey in the coming weeks, but be sure you can be as involved as you would like. Part of spell-breaking is honouring time and timing. So honour yours.

Funds from both monthly subscribers and founding members will pay for the design, editing, and publishing of the book at the end of this journey.

Your name, your story, your pain and re-membering are a vital part of this journey, and I know I wouldn’t do this book justice if I didn’t reach out to you.

By reaching out to you, I am also practising spell-breaking.

If I am honest, it is hard and scary. But I feel like I have no choice. I am trying to walk my talk and break the pattern of “doing it on my own”. I am saying, I can’t do it without you.

If you would like to know more about what I am inviting you into. This is what I am thinking:

• Monthly release of chapters of the book (you will be part of the first readers)

• Audio or video sharing what I was grappling with as I wrote that part

• Thought provocations and suggestions of explorations that you can bring into your daily life

• One monthly collective call ( part of creating a culture in which the spell is NOT the foundation)

• Opportunity for you to give feedback, share comments, tell or write your story

There will also be an opportunity to go deeper into the material if you wish, and to journey with a small cohort of three other members. More on this later.

Who is this for?

Basically, anyone who would like to have a different lens to look at themselves and others from. Anyone who is interested in understanding “the other”. It is especially beneficial for parents of girls and young women, for women going through life transitions (pregnancy, birth, early parenting, perimenopause, menopause) and their partners.

Who may this NOT be for?

People who have very strong views and judgements on the opposite sex and who are not open to looking at them with more care and generosity.

The journey will begin at the end of September.

Join me!