Dear Community,

This paid members post is the invitation to share your transmission (of inner and outer work) with the Stillpoint Community if you like. All info on how and what with links below.

In case you missed it, I just wrote this piece on the WHY here:

THIS POST is the link to the organized, searchable ledger of your (our) work in the world. It is…

Read more

It took me a minute. Full disclosure: most of those non-replies came from men. When they came from women, I was even more baffled.

I was trying really hard to see what was happening — in the same way I once tried hard to read letters that were morphing into fuzzy shapes before my middle-aged eyes, even as I refused to have my eyes tested. My eyes had always worked perfectly. Then they didn’t. But I was so stuck in my own paradigm of 20/20 vision that I refused to see my sight differently.

Same kind of scenario. Different blindness.

One day, indulging my irritation at the lack of engagement with my comments, I had an image of a Gandalf-like old white man standing on a mountain shouting down: “Listen here! You down there! It is wrong — dare I say, utterly and completely wrong — that agriculture has become a soulless extraction machine, severing our sacred tether to Earth as a living consciousness.” In my mind’s eye this godlike man retreats into his eco-friendly, solar-powered cottage. We, the public, cheer.

But also, we cry. We argue. We find ourselves polarised or worse — helpless and distressed.

Meanwhile, in the valley, many are creating community gardens. No one cheers. Change happens. Slowly. It is iterative and like watching grass grow. But still.

Linda Cooper wrote this marvellous piece about menopause as a threshold in both the internal and relational landscape.

Rise Wise

A Letter to the Man Who Loves the Woman at the Menopausal Threshold

You’ve noticed it. I know you have. Something in her has shifted. There’s a sharpness where there used to be softness. A distance where there used to be warmth. She looks at you sometimes, and you can tell she’s searching for something, and the hardest part is that you can’t figure out what…

Read more

2 months ago · 239 likes · 97 comments · Linda Cooper

Last time I checked it had 97 comments and 45 restacks. Linda has responded tenderly to every single comment. This matters. She is naming a truth and inviting people into a new way of relating (including my male partner, for which I’m grateful). There is a feminine principle here that is difficult to miss, especially when contrasted with a very masculine model of thought leadership.

It is remarkable how I missed this utterly obvious fact: those who shout the loudest aren’t the ones making the biggest changes. The platforms with tens of thousands of subscribers and all that sabre-rattling have no bandwidth for community-minded thinkers.

And look — it’s not just men. There are women doing this too. But the model itself is built on a patriarchal architecture: calling things out, being controversial, revealing, disclosing, naming, showing us the horrors. Always from an altitude. We here on the ground receive it.

It feels good, sometimes, to receive it. It has its place.

But what I’ve noticed in myself and in others (family, clients, friends) over time, is that the nervous system cannot metabolise endless deconstruction. And because we are saturated with it, but not held in it (with love, companionship, and community action), it harms us. It contributes to a collective that is braced, brittle, and spiritually malnourished. Just naming what’s wrong keeps us in vigilance, shock, despair, and helplessness.

It is no longer enough.

It doesn’t create safety, connection, or capacity.

Yet, someone, somewhere, is already weaving solutions into reality — in community, in connection, with no platform.

The woman in England working quietly in social housing. The land steward in Australia doing community gardening. The counselor working the suicide hotline. The death doula. The rubbish collector who clears the beach of crisp packets and discarded bottles on a morning walk. The mother who is raising conscious children in the ruins of a collapsing system.

No one is writing viral essays about them.

I have sat with all of this — with my own wild and precious life, my platform, my podcast, my burning mother’s heart, and my therapeutic, love-anchored desire to hold the world — and I have decided to do something, and not just write something.

I am sick to death of high-altitude nosebleeds shouting calamity down the mountain one viral post at a time.

I’ve fallen for it. Felt inferior because of it. These influencers are so pedigreed, so championed by the gatekeepers. I thank them, these thought-leader gods, for having such perceptive mental faculties that they can — from their relative safety — diagnose the world I am actually trying to inhabit. To survive economically, with my own housing insecurity. A world I am gifting to my children minus a few million species, bereft of some critical ecosystems, and absent the steady communal ground required to hold all this grief.

I don’t have the heart for spaces that only respond to praise, deference, and comments reinforcing their authority. I raised my sons to recognise the difference between performing leadership through verbal clarity and direction, and showing up as an actual leader. With time and patience and a commitment to go the distance. Carrying the bags inside and unpacking them — not just announcing that the shopping is in the car.

Because the work is actually hard work.

The work of change is what happens after the doorway of seeing clearly opens, and without preamble, you find yourself on the other side of a door that you can never close again.

Take disclosure. Governments are inching toward official announcements about the reality of interdimensional beings — congressional hearings have pretty much confirmed the existence of craft and beings not of this world. It’s a shocking revelation. Hugely shareable. Endlessly analysed. Even today more files have been released.

Nothing is 100% clear yet. Much less accepted in the mainstream. But imagine the moment after this unambiguous truth is accepted as fact.

You find yourself in a world where these beings are real. Now what? How do we explain human history, consciousness, God, and governance in a context where we are now part of a much larger reality?

Guess who does the work on the ground?

Communities. Families. Often it’s women, mothers — the unimportant ones without huge money or huge platforms — who hold and weave connection. We may not be the ones who reveal. But we are the ones who manage the fallout.

Down here, in homes and therapy rooms and community spaces, we are having the hard conversations. We are crying in each other’s arms. We are cooking food and building something. Mending what is broken. Birthing what is new.

We need to be able to feel the world without collapsing.

We need a mythic framing that makes sense of the chaos from a higher, soul-led point of wholeness — not through the eyes of a conditioned self still invested in the system as it is.

We need embodiment. We hear the facts, we ruminate, we integrate changes conceptually — but only the body can actually live them. We need a path back into the body that leads us away from passive consumption and toward active community-building. Toward a field of belonging.

Here is something I haven’t explained much about my past.

Before my unpaid labour became motherhood and my paid work became therapy, I did doctoral research in a settlement camp in Crimea — officially studying a nonviolent nationalist movement of people who had experienced genocide. The Crimean Tatar people.

I was there to study Gandhian protest methods applied to a voiceless nationalist movement, but what I learned was the power of community — the mycelial network that began at the level of the home and the family, extended to the neighbourhood, and then, like nested dolls, iterated outward.

The conceptual container was social movement theory. The social economics of how change actually happens. How suffering, held in community, becomes the ground from which something new grows.

Even before that, at university, I started a community reading program in underfunded inner city schools. I rarely share this for various reasons (it was a lifetime ago). It was my activist phase, but it left an impression. I also made a lot of mistakes that I learned from.

I had completely forgotten all of this until precisely this article.

A life contains many threads, and only now have I fully woven mine together. The work in the settlement camp, the undergrad volunteer program, the social movement theory, how the suffering of those people created in me a desire to work therapeutically (which I have written about in my very first Substack article), and also to dedicate myself to motherhood, how all of my wounding drove me to create all kinds of programs early on that required me to master technology. Now all of my skills and interests are colliding and I’m having that moment people speak about when, the first time in my life, I look back and every single thing has its place, its contribution.

The mycelial network I studied in Crimea twenty years ago is the same network I am longing to create now.

This is what change actually looks like: It looks like people finding each other. Naming what they are doing. Witnessing each other in the work. Building the thing that needs to exist, slowly, without fanfare, from the ground up.

I’m quite certain that if you’re reading this, then you are someone who is already doing this. Quietly. In your neighbourhood, on your land, in your home, in your body.

The question is whether we can find each other.

The Stillpoint — From Diagnosis to Action

If you want to find each other, I’ve created a space.

The Stillpoint paid membership is a small, serious, beginning. A monthly live call. A living map (in the form of a members only directory) of what members are doing in the world. Members-only writing and extended podcast episodes. A field of belonging for those who tend the inner life and refuse to look away from the outer one.

Subscribe now

More about the Stillpoint Community

The inner work and the outer work can be held in the same container, without apology, without having to choose between them.

Here is what I know about you if you have read this far, and especially if you follow the multidimensionality-centred topic of my podcast the Shattering Place: you are not just consuming information about the state of the world. You are doing something about it — or you desperately want to. You tend your inner life and you cannot look away from the outer one. You are tired of being alone in that particular combination.

This is what your membership includes:

The Convergence: a live 90-minute call once a month. We open with somatic regulation — actual, embodied. We name what is true. We witness each other’s work in the world. We close in stillness. This is a space where people can speak plainly about what they are carrying and what they are doing about it. First call is scheduled for Sunday June 14th.

The Transmission Map: a living, collaborative record of who you are, what drives you, what work you are doing in the world, and what you need. Curated personally by me. A place to be genuinely seen and to find others doing the quiet work you thought you were doing alone.

Members-only writing: essays written directly to this community. Honest and fierce and not polished for general consumption.

The Extended Broadcast: members-only podcast episodes going deeper than the public feed.

The Full Archive: everything I have written and recorded.

What is expected of you? Nothing mandatory. Show up when you can. Speak honestly when you do. Fill in your Transmission Map profile (you will receive the link when you join). Respond to others with the same good faith they offer you.

As for me: I will not produce more than I can transmit with full presence. One podcast episode a week. Two articles a month. One live call. I trust that you are not paying for volume. You are paying for depth.

It is USD $10 a month or USD $99 a year.

Our first call is in three weeks: scheduled for Sunday June 14th at a time that works for UK, US, and Australia.

If this is your kind of space, come in, and I look forward to meeting you!

To navigate the shift from a fear-based, greed-oriented, materialist paradigm to a relational, embodied consciousness, we must first pass through the fire of what is.1

Death.

This past Friday, when I was at work, my phone began to light up with ‘urgent’ messages. My oldest cat Bridget had collapsed, bleeding, and meowed plaintively. We had been expecting it. She had a massive tumour that was displacing her heart. Her small body was already filled with fluid, so we had been watching for signs that it was time to ease her suffering. I rushed home and within the hour, I was at the vet, cuddling her as she left this world and her pain behind.

What I did not know on the day, and would only discover days later, was that at the same moment that she started seizing, our real estate agent left the message that the owner wants to move back into the house we rent.

Within the same hour, our cat died and we were evicted.

Eviction.

This will be the 6th move my family has had to make in 6 years.

I wrote out the number 6 so that I could see it plainly.

Sydney is the second least affordable major city in the world; the median house price is nearly 14 times the average household income. As a divorced single parent, life has been quite interrupted and there have been late starts and other crises I need not name. The result is that I have been stuck renting properties that represent someone else’s stable retirement income. Every time we move, it is cripplingly expensive.

My nervous system has never not been braced for eviction over nearly a decade.

My body wants rest, stability, belonging to place.

But I cannot plant roots when any moment, I may have to uproot myself.

Recently, a client shared with me her worst case scenario. Trembling, she observed how the thought of it filled her chest and throat with panic and dread and how her mind threw up images of grandparents building a life post-war in Europe.

As it turned out, her worst case scenario was MY LIFE.

My life as a middle aged, divorced mother and writer, working a low paid job and subsisting without home ownership, adrift in rental insecurity—that was her worst case scenario.

The architecture of my life—a late-career start, the choice of art over income, the labor of motherhood—is read by capitalism as a moral failure when financial struggle is its consequence. But it is NOT failure. And I am NOT sorry for my choices.

I am, however, distressed by the consequences.

Nature.

The very next morning after Bridget passed and the eviction notice landed in my email, I woke up to a frantic, grinding vibration — a lawnmower? A hedge trimmer? I felt sick. Something is dying, my heart told me.

I went outside. There, high up in the neighbour’s tree, was a saw hacking its way through branch after branch. The sound was a physical intrusion into a nervous system already hyper-vigilant from recent events.

The neighbour was murdering two grand eucalypts that towered above us at the edge of the property, because they are a kind of eucalypt that self-prunes by dropping branches. It’s known as the widow maker. The branches are heavy. They kill. Sometimes. Very rarely. The neighbors feared for their children, so they successfully petitioned the local council to destroy these two perfectly healthy trees.

Those trees were the backdrop for the sunset’s unimaginable beauty, their branches a high perch for noisy cockatoos, an occasional kookaburra, and pairs of lorikeets.

I had a relationship with those trees.

My neighbor had one, perhaps, but a very different one to mine. His action, motivated by a fear of the widow maker, is the same logic used to justify preemptive strikes and erect border walls: the destruction of the ‘other’ (nature, the migrant, the tree) to secure a fragile, imagined safety.

My cat. My home. These trees.

Deep grief began to blossom into a deeper, wider, more universal grief. Of trees and cats, of uncompensated motherhood, of unrecognized art, of women holding together communities — of me, moving again, struggling to afford life.

I felt the grief. I wept. I was — AM— here, again.

»What spiritual seekers may not understand is that awakening does not protect you from life.

»What my loved ones around me may not understand is that my ‘symptoms’ of distress do not represent a collapse into victimhood. They are the phenomenology of feelings; they are not identity.

I feel more deeply, more widely, more passionately now than before my hectic journey of ego shedding and awakening. Underneath the feeling, there is wellness, yes, because despite the waves of intensity, I know I am not that. I AM the one who feels and the one who observes myself feeling.

Moreover, there is a different orientation to suffering that has taken me beyond non-attachment and into universal belonging. Now, when I feel, I make contact with an archetypal lament, as if I have become an open node in a larger network.

Whilst felt, intensely, in my very own soma, this suffering is also connective tissue. It grounds me in the human condition.

As I told my loved ones,

I am not collapsing and I am not in crisis.

I am feeling.

I am fucking feel it all.

The emotion rose until it gathered around me all predecessors and contemporaries. It was a tsunami, not an identity; it was and it IS the pain of all of the women who weren’t even allowed to earn property until the beginning of last century, of all of the artists who chose penury in order to express something deep within that had to come out, of all of the mothers who have sacrificed everything material to get their children an education or put food on the table.

My family was concerned.

They saw the symptoms, not the process.

They wanted me to calm down, to feel optimistic again, to have hope, to ‘reframe it’ as yet another adventure, a new place to live (just ignore the debt it takes to get there). They needed me to be steady, stable, the one who — don’t we all do this as women, as mothers? — to hold it all together for everyone else.

I don’t WANT to hold it together.

To reframe an eviction as an adventure is a form of spiritual gaslighting. My rage is a mindful response to an unconscionable system.

If the mystic’s heart is a mirror for the world, then my heart must reflect the structural violence of the housing market.

So. I did NOT hold it together. The energy of it flowed through me, as grief and as rage. I was met with more attempts to redirect my feelings.

It seems evident to me, from my own experience and through supporting women clients, that womens’ rage is culturally policed. Why? Because it is transformative.

From historical revolutions to the present moment, womens’ rage has been the catalyst that breaks the silence of empire and domesticity alike. We see it now everywhere since the release of the Files. And consider Gisèle Pelicot, whose insistence on a public trial for her own drugging and rape transformed a private horror into a collective reckoning. She showed us that a woman’s fury is the ultimate antidote to systemic shame.2

When I first came across ecologist Joanna Macy and her The Work that Reconnects, in which she implores us to feel the grief of the world as process, I didn’t fully get it. Macy argued that numbing ourselves to the world keeps destructive systems in place, because if we cannot feel the suffering around us, we will not change it, we will only endure it — as I said in my last article, in the same way that an abused spouse endures the abuse rather than leaves.

Now I understand Macy’s work firsthand.

What happened next.

My rage and my grief were so enormous, that in the quiet of dusk through-no-more-branches, I arrived at a brink, feeling death to be the only saviour, a grim reaper to rescue me from this chronic instability, this 6th house move in 6 years.

There, I said it.

I was not collapsing and I was not in crisis - but I WAS feeling it all.

And I am naming it, here. I wanted to die to that stress, that grief, that yet-another-housing-crisis.

This is not pathology. This is a human response to a terrible situation.

Of course I had no plans — but the feeling was all to real.

Spiritual awakening doesn’t bypass the body’s need for safety, home, and continuity. It doesn’t erase the realities of capitalism, corporatism, or life itself.

But it does change how we meet struggle.

This is the path.

The wound is the way.

Because, as Rumi says, the wound is the place where the light enters.

The alchemical happens when you give this intensity a green light. Allowing not just personal agony, but the archetypal, intergenerational, societal depth of it. I am not a refugee escaping war with a child on my back; I am just a middle aged late bloomer in the suburbs moving house again and again —and yet there IS a connection here.

This is a vast web of life, of which we are all a part, each of us a node in a larger network.

The refugee who is suffering exists within the same systems of power, privilege, the same economic systems that treat humans as expendable, and she is suffering more than me, but she does not have a voice.

I am not paying this lip service. For my doctoral research, I lived in a re-settlement camp with survivors of genocide. I documented an underground government organizing in the shadow of total displacement. I know that when the structures of the world fail, the only thing left is the relational web. If I—with all my privilege and education—cannot name the violence of my own displacement, I abandon the lineage of those who have no choice but to speak from the wreckage.

An Invitation

This confluence of my cat’s death, the eviction, and the destruction of the healthy trees was the medicine I needed to feel to such an extent that something broke in me, something roared out from the wound,

and now, something also transmutes.

It marks a shift from the heavy, frozen quiet of dorsal collapse (my decades-long bracing)—the biological self-preservation strategy of the precariat3—into a fierce, mobilized sympathetic agency.

It is the movement from being a body acted upon to a body that acts.

This is the work:

To be a node where the systemic becomes somatic. My struggles are entry points into collective pain, into a landscape of crucial choice points for our crumbling world.

If I can hold the grief of a dying cat, the destruction of nature, and the rage of a broken housing system in the same breath, I am no longer a victim of the machine—I am the grit in its gears,4 and someone who withstands the pressure with enough power to transmute it.

So, I will not bypass the struggle. I will NOT reframe it.

I will inhabit it until the structures that caused it begin to tremble. My rage and my grief will be roots that connect me to life. My vulnerability is my invitation to others, perhaps you?

It’s okay. You, too, can feel this.

This is just the beginning.

About Me:

This ‘feeling through’ and the radical act of naming it is the heartbeat of my work. I am a writer, a PhD in social sciences, and a somatic therapist with over 15 years of clinical experience. I’m also a 52 yo menopausal (thank goddess) mother of 3 young adults.

I juggle a full time therapy practice with a thoughtful full time podcast, the Shattering Place Podcast, where I propose that navigating what comes next requires us to embrace our multidimensionality and heal our nervous systems in order to contain it—and in so doing, bring somatic truth to our personal lives, our communities, and our relationship with power.

My first 9 solo episodes are bold, in-depth, with multidimensional stories, built on a foundation of solid research. Season 2 is all about interviews with healers, creatives, thought leaders, scientists and more — enlivening conversations with tales from the trenches.

My paid tier on this Substack is the Stillpoint Community. It is the evolving laboratory for this work, an effort to move from individual survival into collective resonance. When you join, you are supporting a commitment to the collective, a container built to hold us as we pass through the fire of the great transition.

WORK WITH ME PRIVATELY: If you are interested in genuine, deep, multidimensional 1-1 work with me, I have limited spots due to my commitment other than my local practice. 👉 Secure your spot here.

Let’s hold this together — my default internal mantra — has stretched my heart and my holding to the edges of the known world.

Yes, yes, I work at the edge of trauma and spiritual emergence; there is always a process of unfolding that lives in tandem with release. When we go to ground, we plant seeds of self and inevitably there is a flowering—but this, this collective rot is something else. Like never before, it feels like we are all part of a much larger tilling of the soil, and we can feel it in our bones, this deep excavation as we sit in the quiet before the cataclysm that (could) end in ground zero, a state which precedes cultivation.

So what, what is the world asking of us right now?

Unless you’re living under a rock, where incidentally you’re still very much part of the ground we all tread daily, you know, you know, that something is coming to a head.

I have no somatic practice to get you through. There is no breathing technique. The wound is the way.

This »

the geopolitical landscape, the files, disclosure, the bombs, the oversight, the wars, the polarity and division and hate, including our experience within it — it reminds me of the death throes of a toxic, abusive relationship:

A person arrives distressed and dishevelled and words tumble out.

It’s clear that they are in an abusive relationship,

but they’re not ready to leave.

They won’t name it, or even entertain it, because they don’t know how.

They don’t have the resources (emotional, practical, psychological), and they convince themselves they CAN endure it a bit longer, because there are so many complexities in the exit strategy:

the children, the shared care, the finances, and there’s no family around to help, and no friends to count on (because friends don’t know, as this abuse has been hidden).

This individual does not even pose the question, “How will I do it alone?”

What this individivual says instead is,

“Can you just give me a tool to help me stay? To endure better? Something to settle my nervous system so that I can better cope with my abusive partner who’s harming me?”

We always begin here:

Help me endure. NOT, help me leave.

My heart cracks open.

I have seen this hundreds of times.

I say, of course, we need to resource you, we need to build your foundation.

We discuss safety. I make assurances: we are a team, we are in this together, we will create a safety plan, and we will create a nervous system support plan.

Eventually, when there is readiness to hear it, I say,

“But not so that you can stay and endure for the rest of your life. Rather, so that you have the strength and the resources to change your life in all the ways that support your evolution.”

Back to the world.

Of course you—you readers—you know what I’m going to say next. You can see the parallels. But let me state it very explicitly, just in case:

We have all been in a toxic relationship with power, with the systems that govern our lives, and now like never before we are seeing it — but more so, we are feeling it.

Again, I’m hearing:

Help me endure. NOT, help me leave.

Some of you know this all too well. Some of you have been on this path yourselves in a relationship, and if so, I’m so sorry. It’s terrible. People say “just leave your abuser!”

You, of all people, understand that it’s not that simple.

Sometimes there’s no one to hold us; we can’t just leave. There are thousands of threads of connection and complexity that make us dependent, trapped.

For the individual in the abusive relationship, these threads keep the victim locked in and overwhelmed by change—necessary changes, from ensuring an independent source of income, to physical safety, to proving that the other is NOT safe in order to organize the technicalities of sharing childcare.

I could go on, but you get the point.

In the larger system that is life,

life on planet Earth at this point in time, we also now understand that we are in a toxic relationship — in this case, to power.

But it’s not so easy to extricate ourselves from this relationship either. We can’t just ditch a job that pays our bills, or remove ourselves instantaneously from a work culture that feels like it’s sucking our life blood, or leave our communities for greener pastures, or agitate for change.

Or can we?

How can we protest a system of institutional disempowerment, a system that mirrors the financial abuse I see in domestic relationships, in which one person controls the pursestrings and denies livelihood to the other, a system in which the individual has no say in where the family funds go … just as we, citizens of wherever, have no say in how tax money is used to fund wars that we don’t support.

I hope you feel this in your bones as I do.

When people say, what shall we do? how can we endure? —it’s because of hopelessness wrapped in powerlessness.

What we are really asking is:

How can we extricate ourselves from this toxic relationship?

I mean our relationship with the world, with power, with extractive technologies, with late stage Capitalism, with corporatism, with a job that doesn’t bring us joy, with financial instability that is built into the system, with privilege upon which the system rests, with the terror wrought on our neighbours and our human brethren, who succumb in their cars or in the rubble while others of us … navigate traffic, drink our coffee, and discover yet one more powerful person whose heart is a cesspool that used to house a soul.

So my friends, I find myself in the same place as many of my clients, only in a different context, down a rabbit hole into a holographic reality where the internal is a mirror to the external, in which the microcosm of the self mirrors the macrocosm of the whole.

I’m not here to tell you what to believe, but I will invite you to enlarge the frame,

to include your being or soul and not just—

your self, your ideals, your hopes and dreams

and traumas and challenges,

but also to include the unseen.

Include the part of you that knows

that there is more.

That this more matters.

Your soul, your God, by whatever name you give it, your divine nature, the phenomenology of miracles, of spirit, that which is revealed at near death, or that which is revealed by plant medicine, or by numinous experiences of expanded consciousness.

The hidden reality, ALL OF IT, it has ontological weight.

We cannot prove it, but we know it, and it is meaningful.

YOU matter, and not just the you who drives to work in traffic, who mourns a loss, who cries because of species extinction and climate change, or because war and polarity are bringing us to a brink of something awful,

but the other you also matters — that essential essence of you who has never NOT been a node in a larger tapestry that requires your presence because it is integral to a larger structural integrity.

Perhaps, who you are becoming is more important than who you are right now.

The wound is the way.

The world is asking that we feel our way through, individually, and collectively, so that we have the strength and the resources to change our lives in all the ways that support our evolution.

We are in this together.

For now, feeling this together — it’s enough. We must feel, and not deny that we are feeling. It’s the catharsis necessary for change.

About Me: In May, I turn 52, and I’m just getting started. My 3 kids are adults. I juggle a full time therapy practice with a thoughtful full time podcast, the Shattering Place Podcast. My mission is to propose that the paradigm shift we need to navigate what comes next is embracing the truth of multidimensionality. My first 9 solo episodes are bold, in-depth, with multidimensional stories, built on a foundation of solid research. Season 2 is all about interviews with healers, creatives, thought leaders, scientists and more — enlivening conversations with tales from the trenches.

My paid tier on this Substack is the Stillpoint Community — it is my effort to hold you in this transition. When you join the paid tier, you support my work; you support THIS work, which is my commitment to the collective.

WORK WITH ME PRIVATELY: If you are interested in genuine, deep, multidimensional 1-1 work with me, I have limited spots due to my commitment other than my local practice. 👉 Secure your spot here.

Finally, if you’re feeling angry:

On the other hand, if considering the end is calling in you a rebirth:

My words, my podcast, it is my soul’s song. Sometimes its a lament, but always with a weaving in of hope. Thank you walking this path with me 🙏🏻

The Shattering Place Podcast: Season 1 Episode Guide

Ep. 1: The Crack in the Vessel: Outgrowing the myth of materialism

In this season premiere, author and somatic therapist MD Dixon explores what might very well be the collapse of the materialist worldview and how multidimensionality is becoming increasingly valid in various fields. Is it possible that the shattering of our old certainties is actually an evolutionary upgrade? What might this mean for where humanity is headed in these troubled times?

Ep. 2: The Body as a Portal: The somatic interface

We explore the body as an interface between dimensions. Drawing on 15 years of clinical experience, Dixon explores the mechanics of what she calls somatic resonance—the way the physical body senses and translates the unseen field. Is the human vessel truly capable of bridging different timelines and realities?

Ep. 3: The Collective Broadcast: Beyond the myth of the isolated mind

Most of us believe our thoughts are private, yet the evidence suggests we are living in a shared mental landscape. We look at the “Telepathy Tapes” and the reality of heart coherence to understand how our internal states act as a public broadcast. If our minds are interconnected, what does that mean for the way we hold our personal grief and joy, and the collective might experience our own healing?

Ep. 4: The Lineage of Light: Ancestral and Incarnational resonance

The history of your lineage isn’t just in the past; it is actually vibrating in your cells right now! We dive into the science of ancestral resonance and the phantom frequencies of trauma and wisdom passed through generations. How can we clear these inherited echoes to finally reclaim our presence in the present moment?

Ep. 5: Future Memory & IKONA: Navigating the non-linear Now

If we can feel the weight of the past, is it possible we can also sense the pull of the future? Drawing on the central themes of her visionary novel IKONA, Dixon explores “Future Memory”—the phenomenon of a future self reaching back to guide the present. Could the blueprints for our species’ evolution already be available to us if we know how to listen?

Ep. 6: The Death of the Old World: Grounding through the collapse

Global upheaval can feel like a catastrophe, but what if it is the labor pain of a planet in transition? IN this episode, we look at the collective shadow and the dissolution of old structures through a somatic lens. How do we stay grounded and resonant in our bodies while the world as we know it falls away?

Ep. 7: Ascension and Awakening: The Discipline of Embodiment

Ascension is often understood as being somehow apart from or beyond the world, an escape from the mundane. But true awakening is a grounded, embodied experience. In this episode, we attempt to rescue the concepts of awakening and ascension from the distortions of popular culture, spiritual paywalls, and the myth of specialness.

Ep. 8: The Illuminated Manuscript: You are the transmission

There comes a point where we realize our life itself is the message. We move from internal healing to the realization that every word and thought acts as a multidimensional event. What happens to the world around us when we audit our personal broadcast and choose to live as a transmission of coherence?

Ep. 9: The Architecture of Emergence (The Season Finale): The birth of the New Human

In the season finale, we synthesize the shift from a materialist collapse to a new human operating system. We explore the biology of survival and speculate on the biology of emergence and transmission. We consider the purpose of being human, locating it within an embodied experience that may even have relevance to the wider, galactic field. Dixon asks: are you ready to stop fixing the old world and start becoming the architecture of the new?

But for those of you who have chosen to support this work through a paid subscription, I want to create a space that goes beyond listening—a space for direct integration and inquiry.

Starting now, I am opening a new, exclusive feature for paid members: The Guest Q&A.

How it works

This is the place where we bridge the gap between concept and application. When I have an upcoming interview, I will publish a dedicated thread here in the Substack feed.

Read more

Beyond the shattering, 
beyond the collapse of systems and old ways of being, 
beyond personal and collective trauma, 
there is the still point. 

Here, we gather —
to stabilise our nervous systems,
to evolve our consciousness,
to refuse the separation of inner and outer,
and to live the transmission as action.

Welcome.

You didn’t find this publication, or the Shattering Place Podcast, by accident.

You’re someone who knows the world is changing — and you know it in your body, and you know it in your soul. You’ve done the inner work, or you’re doing it. You understand that your own healing is not separate from the healing of the world. And you’re tired of communities that ask you to choose between your spirituality and your fury, between tending to yourself and tending to the world.

The Stillpoint is where those things are the same thing.

The Stillpoint is a living transmission and a shared way of being.

As a mother, a somatic therapist, a former social sciences academic who researched genocide and non-violent nationalism, and as a woman who has walked the long path of my own shattering — I know that true evolution is an organic process of allowance. And I know that a regulated nervous system, far from being an end to itself, is the foundation from which we act.

Expanding our consciousness requires a nervous system with the capacity to hold it. We often try to anchor a wider, more inclusive awareness into a body still locked in survival loops and intergenerational wounding. In my work, I don’t just focus on creating a sanctuary for spiritual emergence. I am deeply engaged with somatic regulation and clearing cellular memory, so that your nervous system has the bandwidth to integrate your evolution and to bring it into the world.

The answer is to find the still point within, and to live that as a transmission of hope.

The Paid Membership is where we meet.

Monthly, live, together.

Here you are able to say out loud what you’re doing in the world and why it’s hard. Where your nervous system gets actual support, not just content about nervous systems. Where you find out who else is quietly doing this work and where they are — healing past trauma, growing food, facilitating community groups, offering therapy, protecting land, shifting narratives, raising conscious children.

This is for the individual who is spiritually awake and refuses to look away. Who doesn’t want to choose between a meditation cushion and genuine anger about the state of the world.

We need peers, not just podcasts.

WHAT YOUR MEMBERSHIP SUSTAINS

By joining the paid tier, you are directly sustaining the research, production, and transmission that goes into every podcast episode and article. I am so grateful — because it allows me to produce something that otherwise I simply could not. We are in this together.

$10 a month, or less if you pay annually.

Are you ready to become the transmission?

Come in.

AS A MEMBER OF THE STILLPOINT, YOU RECEIVE:

The Monthly Transmission Circle

A 90-minute live call where we open with somatic regulation, name what is true, witness each other’s work in the world, and close in stillness. This is the heartbeat of the community.

The Transmission Map

A living, collaborative document built by members — showing what transmissions others focus on in their lives, and where. You are not alone in this.

The Extended Broadcast

Members-only podcast episodes that go deeper than the public feed — philosophical frameworks, somatic practices, and stories from my work.

The Full Archive

Complete access to every past article and deep-dive — a searchable library at the intersection of trauma recovery, spiritual emergence, collapse, and the evolution of humanity.

Dedicated Members-Only Articles

Written directly to this community. Not polished for mass appeal — written to you, with full honesty.

The Member Chat

A dedicated space to connect between calls, share your process, and stay grounded in a shared frequency.

Are you ready to become the transmission?

If you’re looking for the member’s only guest Q&A so you can post a question for my podcast guests, it’s here »

For those who are new to my publication, I work at the intersection of trauma and spirituality. I see things in my day to day that I write through in order to understand them, and one thing I see that …

Read more

Read more

She called me by my name, and told me that my wish would come true.

My wish was that I would be given wings so that I could fly again. I seemed to remember that I could, somewhere, somehow. As a child I was quite tenacious and proactive when I desired something (and maybe I still am), and in this case, I prayed obsessively every night that God give me back my wings. I fully expected a response from God, so the fact that I received one felt very much in the natural order of things. I was grateful, but it was not paradigm-shifting. If anything, it was confirmation of a worldview and spiritual orientation that I had been born with, and it has served as a reminder all these years later that we are all very much seen, heard, and loved.

Before the angel

As far back as I can recall, I knew there was more to me than my personhood, and wondered who exactly was this self I proposed to be. I felt that somehow I was infinitely more. I puzzled over why I could not walk though walls, or move things with my mind, or fly. I spent my nights astral travelling and meeting many entities, journeying to far planets, and each morning fell through multi-colored tunnels and landed hard in my body, arising again as “Michelle” – with dim memories of my nighttime antics, knowing, absolutely, that something real was happening. Life as Michelle felt dense and slow and drowsy. I felt that somehow, daytime was the dreamscape, and something else, someplace else, was real.

During the height of these nighttime travels, at age six or so, I began to pray diligently for angel wings. I truly believed that some mistake had been made, and that I really ought to be able to fly. Having wings felt to me to be the missing piece of life's puzzle, the corrective to my identity as a wee girl, land-bound. I even tied paper plates to my arms and jumped off my dresser, desperate for a quick fix. Luckily, I was cautious by nature, and had a scientific mind. I had the foresight to test the dresser before progressing to the roof, which owing to the failure of the dresser, never happened.

Yet I carried on praying for those wings, for months and months (maybe years) on end. I had total belief that my devotion would be rewarded angelically. Then, one day, my grandfather and I sat together with one hand each on the ‘wishbone’ after our chicken dinner. We tugged at that poor little bone and when it snapped, I got the larger part—which meant that I won. It was a sign, I was sure, a sign that my wings were imminent. That was the RULE of wishbones —the one who breaks off the larger bone gets their wish fulfilled!

Quick anatomy lesson before I get to the angel - what is the chicken wishbone?

I never, never as a child even thought about the symbolism or meaning of the wishbone tug-of-war, much less what part of the chicken we were contending over.

As it turns out, the wishbone is where the wings attach!

the wishbone serves as a strut between the bird’s shoulders to keep them apart, and as a point of attachment for the pectoral muscles that power the downstroke of the wing. Source

Not to mention, not just wishbones, but chickens more generally have their own rich symbolic history connected to the granting of wishes.

The tradition dates back to the Etruscans, an ancient civilization that lived in the area we know as Italy today. But instead of breaking the bone in half, Etruscans would make a wish while stroking the bone — more like a good luck charm. According to Peter Tate’s book, Flights of Fancy, it was during the St. Martin’s Night celebrations in medieval Europe that people started the wishbone tradition as we know it today with two people pulling on the wishbone, then called “merry thought.”  

Poultry have a long history of being used to grant wishes and tell the future. Ancient Greeks used to place grain on marked cards or mark kernels of corn with letters and carefully record which ones their chickens pecked first. The Roman army carried cages of “sacred chickens” with them — the designated chicken keeper was known as the pullarius. Source

After I won the wishbone, the next day I saw what looked like a package on my grandparent’s roof. I knew it was my wings! I insisted that my grandfather go get the package for me. I didn't tell him what it most definitely contained, I just said something like,

“Hey grandpa, there is a package on the roof for me from God, and it is something I asked for when I won the wishbone. Can you please go get it?”

I laugh now. As a six year old, this was entirely reasonable. Looking back, I can’t imagine how eccentric my devoted grandpa thought I was, but we had a very special bond and he indulged all my crazy ideas. (I used to plaster his hair with little-girl hair clips and he’d wear them to dinner just for me).

He didn’t require much cajoling. The very next morning he got out his ladder and climbed up onto the roof.

He shouted down to me, matter-of-fact, that nothing was there. He explained that what I’d seen were just roof tiles piled up at a slight angle and bulging.

(I still cannot believe he climbed onto the roof for me. I suspect he never told my grandmother about it, because she would have freaked out. It must have been our little secret.)

I was disheartened by the absence of a package on the roof, but I still had faith that God would be delivering my wings soon, because I had won the wishbone, after all. So I didn’t cry. I just waited and kept praying.

Then it happened.

A few days later, I kicked a ball into the hedge, and when I came scrambling out, I looked up to see an angel, beatific and entirely Christian in her appearance, a white woman with golden-blonde hair, which was consistent with what I believed at the time (I was being raised Protestant, specifically Lutheran). This angel, dressed in a long white gown, and as tall as the roof of the carport that she stood next to, was bathed in light, her giant white wings protruding from her back. I was surprised, awed, but not scared.

She said, “Hello Michelle. I’ve heard your prayers. You will receive your wings as you’ve asked.” She then gave me a date, or I think she gave me a date — in any case, I promptly forgot whatever she said about the timing of my wings!

(Ughh, if only I could recall —but then, do I really want to know, if it’s the date of my death?)

As for what I do recall: again, AWE. She was enormous. I also felt seen and loved, but in a way that felt natural, and not, as NDE-ers report of their near-deaths, in a way that seemed profound or in contrast with love on earth. I was so young, after all, and probably my memory of non-earthly realms was sufficiently fresh in my awareness that this love and comfort seemed par for the course.

In my childish way, I understood at that moment that all my beliefs were correct —someone was listening to me when I prayed. I was known and loved and taken seriously. It was an experience which embedded this truth into my very being, instantly.

Not to mention, it was so reassuring that I would get what I so desired, even if it wasn’t to my exact timeframe (sound familiar?). I don’t remember feeling upset that I’d have to wait. I was just so glad that someone was on the case!

When I came rushing into the house breathless to tell my grandmother about the angel, she told me I must have been daydreaming, or maybe I’d fallen asleep and had actually dreamt it. (Seriously? I’d just fallen asleep while I was playing in the backyard in the middle of the day? While I was kicking a ball around?)

Her response was so preposterous and dismissive. It had obviously happened, so it seemed both perplexing and pointless to insist otherwise when my grandmother had made up her mind that I was delusional.

In addition to the great gift of feeling validated in my knowing that I was loved and heard and looked after from beings beyond this world, the other worthwhile result of this visitation was that from then on, I trusted my own experience far more than any one else’s explanations of so-called ‘reality.’

For years afterwards, every few months I would sit outside in a small plastic chair, and just wait for my angel to appear again. I wanted to chat. I wanted to know more. I was very patient and very persistent, and waited for an hour or more regularly. I think I finally stopped waiting around the time adolescence began.

She did not return in my waking hours, not that I remember. But I have never stopped expecting magical things to happen. And a few things did, which I will share another time!

Who am I?

As I grew up, I continued to be preoccupied with the seeming finite and limited nature of my beingness. It seemed to me that I could be anyone or do anything, that it was some sort of fated thing that I was a girl, Michelle, placed in my family of origin. I seemed to remember being in other times and places. My first written stories were attempts to write in a Cockney accent, which seemed to be a very loud voice in my head (I was raised in the American South and everyone around me had a Southern accent). When I was about seven, I showed my father a photo of London, and told him that I remembered living there and being very poor. He taught me the word deja vu, the meaning of which was literally my truth (I had seen it all before)—yet his explanation of that term was that my brain was playing tricks on me.

I lost even more faith in adults, and became very quiet about my experiences and memories, which seemed far more real to me than anything people said or thought about them.

I wrote prolifically from the age of six, and by my teenage years kept all my writings in a filing cabinet. I thought that if I kept all my stories and childhood diaries, I might periodically read over them and work out who I was with the impartiality of retrospection.

Even as a teenager I viewed my writing as a sort of record of my identity, a meaning-make exercise, which it remains to this day.

As a late teen, I dabbled in astral travel, meditated, and talked to a few beings in an altered state, the liminal state between sleep and wakefulness. All this confirmed to me that there was, in fact, much, much more than the world seemed to consider, but none of it made much sense, and none of it was clear as that angelic visitation.

As an adult, like most, when faced with educational choices, career choices, and life choices like relationships and so on, I narrowed my focus, relinquished my searching, and came to identify as the person I thought I should be. I followed my ego-desires with determination, very much constructing an identity in response to genetic, childhood, and social patternings, and importantly, in response to my childhood wounding. I took what hurt the most, and tried to make it better by actualising an identity to redeem it. It matters not what the wounding was; it's a pattern we all follow. Wherever there is pain, there is an equal and opposite force of identity-creation in response to it: to repress it, to deny it, to carve victimhood or survivorhood or spiritual warriorhood from it.

Like every other person on the planet, I experienced victories and failures, and created a life that I thought was ‘mine’ and reflected, authentically, who I thought I was and ought to be. I earned degrees, married, and had three children. I wrote novels that never got published, and over time, attempted to quiet my internal struggle to figure out who I was or should be. Nothing felt quite right, and nothing seemed to be working quite as I had hoped, expected, and planned for, but it felt wrong - ungrateful even - to question the life I had.

But then, that’s an essay on another topic, the beginning of a search that would lead to more and more spiritual experiences, and eventually teachers and awakenings. I shared a bit here, on my existential crisis, and here on my changed relationship to ambition.

Always, there is this memory of the angel, and the belief that there is a Being who—even as she perhaps giggled at my tenacity—saw an opening to plant a seed. A reminder.

The angel phenomenon

Since this time, I have researched others’ experiences with angels. Mostly those of trauma survivors. In dark moments of bodily dissociation, they sometimes find themselves in other realms with angelic helpers who communicate that same loving presence I felt: Always-there, ever-watching, and so sympathetic to our human desires even if limited in their ability to shift the human experience beyond facilitating a state-change or effecting a quick emergency astral relocation.

That is, these interventions don’t change the narrative of life directly—there is a return to the trauma experience, the same perpetrators, the same horror—yet the experience most definitely shifts the energetic imprint of the experiencer. In other words, it “increases one’s vibration”—which has a direct consequence on reality here in 3D, particularly in its ability to deflect certain negative experiences.

I have also had a few clients who have had an experience of visitations in the midst of trauma. They see and feel beings who play certain specific roles: a woman appearing as a guide, just emanating mother-love; a being who arrives to carry the child out of harm’s way, after which there is a sense of lost time, and a change of location.

As for me, I was so young, and safe in my family environment, so it’s difficult to say how this visitation affected my energy field, except to say that I was much more open to non-ordinary phenomena afterwards. I note P.M.H. Atwater’s studies on children experiencers of near death, and how there is a definite openness to such phenomena after, as well as an increase in lateral thinking skills and even IQ (thanks to for sending me down this rabbit hole in my research!)

I’m left with this

My angel experience was a seminal experience in my young life, and explains a lot about me—my incurable faith, my dogmatic belief in the unseen world, my utter conviction that we are always heard by Spirit, always loved, and have guidance that is ever faithful and attentive to our desires and prayers.

It has not led to a career in mediumship, needless to say. I sense things, but not to any professional degree!

A few years ago I had a client on the table receiving some bodywork for trauma release. I had the knowing that there were angels in the room with us. Not just one, but specifically four. After we finished I tentatively told her that I felt an angelic presence. She laughed and said that she always works with four angels, and had called them to her before our session.

So, they are still around, even if I don’t see them anymore.

Now, of course, I wonder if the promised wings were literal or metaphorical. If the angelic being foretold some sort of awakening, or my literal death and the freedom of the soul to fly after leaving the body behind.

Do you have any such experiences? Please do share in the comments below!

Subscribe now

For those who are interested in learning how to work with me, you can visit me here: michelle-dixon.com

Read more

These days, trauma is so much a part of our social landscape that the teenagers in my house throw around the term casually, and many a minor inconvenience prompts declarations like, “I’m so traumatised,” and…

Read more