I got to my friend’s house looking like I was going to move in. After a cup of tea and a general catch up I got to “work”. I slowly took over the bedroom, setting up my accessories, shoes etc… and I suddenly realized all those years backstage had served me well, I knew how to set up a styling station without giving it a thought.

I filmed my outfits, moved around my friends gorgeous apartment taking pictures, we messed around in the kitchen recreating something that made me look like a little Italian old lady, which is after all who I am, and at the end of the day, it was fun! Admittedly I felt slightly uncomfortable filming myself, of course, but this wasn’t influencer content, it was me showing a skirt I had made and how you can wear handmade stuff in a cool context. It felt authentic, and most of all I had a great time doing it.

When I got home I put the reel together pretty quickly, and although I felt a bit hesitant before pushing the “post” button, I chucked it down to nerves, being seen is always a little startling for me, especially in this context. I worked in fashion for 15 years, a lot of the people that follow me are models, casting directors, model agents, designers and stylists… Its fucking intimidating to say the least, to put yourself out there in front of this crowd!

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You might have been following this substack for a little while, before it pivoted from writing about fashion, to a more authentic version of itself!

If you’ve been here that long, you might recall a series of content I used to post under the bracket of “the jig is up”. This was content related to the underbelly of fashion brands being revealed.

Now I just need you to understand that I have 4 placements in Aquarius including my sun and rising signs, i’ll translate this for the muggles but it’s essentially impossible for me to not be authentic. My bullshit radar is through the roof, I can sniff it out the second it walks into the room.

So the longer I sat with this concept of “the jig is up” the more I noticed and heard that this is becoming a universal truth for everyone.

Frequency is the new currency.

No matter what you’re doing in life, even if you’re doing “good” work. If the intention behind what you’re doing is not correct and aligned, it will at some point stop working for you whether that’s 5 months or 5 years down the line. Perhaps you’re a doctor, you run a charity, you’re a wellness coach, you believe you’re having a positive impact in the world, and perhaps to some extent this is true, but if you’re not coming to your work from a place of alignment it just won’t last.

Let me give you a more practical example. Perhaps you’re a nutritionist, and your whole business is designed around intuitive eating, teaching people to listen to their bodies cues instead of sticking to specific diets. You might even be really successful and helping others, but at the same time you are numbing your own bodies cues by taking Ozempic.

It’s not about having to be perfect before putting our work out in the world, it’s about being in integrity. Do our words align with our actions?

In an increasingly online world, it’s easier and easier to portray the illusion of being a person with wisdom who is worth following. Maybe you’re in the wellness space and you preach about meditation, yet you never spend any time cultivating a deep practice.

It's easy to fake mastery at the moment, but we are moving into a time where what we are doing in the physical world matters less and less. Our frequency, our energy, the pulse of what we put out into the world is going to become the true currency.

If you are familiar with any kind of manifestation work (the North Star being TBM!) you already know that you can make things happen without doing too much external work as the heavy lifting is done internally.

So maybe you’re reading this and thinking, ok shit how do I know if I’m in alignment?

1. Are your words matching your action?

   Are you the same person you are projecting out into the world as you are when you are when nobody is watching? Are you telling people you are somebody who you are actually not?

2. Is the energy with which you’re showing up with, coming from a place of being healed?

Both can be tricky to spot. The first one requires a healthy dose of self awareness (one study found that only 10-15% of people are sufficiently self aware, whilst the % of people who believe they are self aware is actually much higher) and willingness to confront the most uncomfortable truths of ourselves. This requires the blinkers to come off, and they may have been on for a really long time.

I think the second one is even tougher to examine. Maybe you’ve started working for a charity or become a doctor, or whatever your version of doing “good” is, just so you could prove to your parents that you are deserving of love and a good person. Perhaps your ambition is to work in politics and make a real change, but you are constantly triggered by people with opposing views, or lack the self confidence to withstand criticism. You can see how any of these scenarios in the long run won’t last.

Showing up for yourself can be really challenging but the reward of doing what is truly meant for you is priceless. Living in alignment doesn’t just mean you are more likely to succeed, but it takes you to a place of experiencing more peace and more love, which at the end of the day is all that really matters.

“In tribal cultures that which we call “magic” takes its meaning from the fact that humans, in an indigenous and oral context, experience their own consciousness as simply one form of awareness among many others.”

Right off the bat my copy of the book is earmarked and underlined in multiple places on each page (not just in pencil but also pen, imagine the commitment!). When I first read this book, it spoke to me in a language which my whole body mind and soul understood.

I previously said that we fetishize indigenous cultures & their relationship to nature, however we need to remember that whether you are living on your indigenous land or not, somewhere in your ancestry there is a history of connection to the land. If you go back in time long enough, we are all inextricably connected to our land.

If we go back in time long enough, you would find a practice or at least a belief in magic too because the two are so interwoven.

You might say you don’t believe in magic but I think perhaps you do. Im almost certain you’ve thought of somebody and then they called you, or you walked into a room and sensed that something wasn’t right. We hear miraculous stories of how somebody was supposed to board a plane, but they decided not to and then that plane crashed. If I told you to wish a life threatening illness on your mother, or your child, Im certain you wouldn’t because something inside of you believes in the power of your words.

Neuroscience already backed up the knowledge that our thoughts shape our reality. If that isn’t magic then what is?

But why does this matter? Why am I always going on about nature & magic?

Humans largely assume their consciousness is the only consciousness and that our perspective is the only perspective, or at least the only worthy one. If you can reconnect, and I mean truly reconnect with your natural environment, you will understand that quote right at the start. Human consciousness is only one of many, amongst all living things. If you can connect to nature, you can connect to its ineffable mystery, and begin to comprehend magic.

The key is that once you understand magic, you unlock the door to possibility.

Suddenly life has a numinous quality. You begin to believe in the possibility that life doesn’t have to stay the way it is. You dont have to continue in career that doesn’t fulfill you, in a relationship you have outgrown. If magic exists, then maybe you can find somebody to love, to have a family with.

If magic exists, then anything is possible. Magic is the key to you believing that your life can change. And surely is the biggest gift that nature could give you.

If you’re here reading this, you likely have some kind of adoration or at least interest in nature. You have probably hiked to the top of a mountain, or watched the sunrise and experienced a sense of awe, wonder or even peace perhaps. The connection and sense of belonging we experience when we are in a natural environment is unquestionable.

Im here to tell you, that you are not separate from this.

Let yourself be affected by your natural world, reabsorb yourself into what is your natural environment. I no longer recoil at the sting of Nettle, I now marvel at the accuracy of their communication.

The reason you feel so connected to nature, the reason you feel at home in nature, is because you are nature.

This might feel like an abstract concept, but despite being the perpetrators of climate injustices, humans are also part of nature. The natural world isn’t just comprised of an intricate web of trees, birds and other wildlife. You are part of that wild life, you belong to the forest floor as much the moss and the mycelium, you have just been conditioned to forget.

The incongruence you might feel when I say this, is because of the disconnection we are all experiencing. We live in a world that requires us to subscribe to ways of living which are fundamentally unsustainable not just for us humans but for the earth and its other inhabitants too.

Our current systems force us to disconnect from our bodies, from our environment, from our community. The system glorifies earning but not creating, but why struggle to be the bread winner when you could simply be the bread maker? Much of the dis-ease we experience is a cry for reconnection to our natural environment.

We often fetishize indigenous people, whose culture is built around living in symbiosis with the natural environment, and their belief in animism. Yet we forget that we ourselves are indigenous to our own lands, no matter how far you might be from it.

Colonizers were only able to colonize others because they themselves had already been colonized. The gospel of organized religion, speaks against worship of the natural world and twists it into a disguise for devil worship. Prehistoric Britain was likely polytheist, but with the Roman invasion of Britain, this changes with the introduction of Christianity and the veneration of a singular, all knowing, all powerful God. It also introduces the notion of good and evil, creating a binary as well as polarity which instills urgency in the choosing between a need for salvation or eternal damnation.

I make this point to highlight that everyone and every culture has a history of being connected to their environment, we have just traded it in for a life of convenience and modern technology.

A life that is centered around reconnecting to our natural state doesn’t require much beyond our silence and stillness to tune into the wisdom that is innately within each one of us. It asks us to reach towards it, not to turn away from it. This is obviously not good for business. We marvel at our pets, and our dog’s abilities to sense danger before it’s even close. A cat that can sense when their human is about to turn into the drive way. Birds who predict the weather by sensing the changes of pressure in the air. We have many of the same abilities, we are just desensitized to our environment and constantly distracted.

Many of us experience varying degrees of disconnection which shows up in a number of ways. Im not saying this is the only reason, but whether physically or mentally we all experience discomfort caused by a degree of this disconnect.

The rekindling of your relationship to your natural environment is a radical act of defiance. Rest, patience, slowness, waiting are all uncomfortable and inconvenient acts of resistance that will ultimately lead to a more balanced life. These seemingly meaningless qualities defy the order which we are subjected to, and reclaim the natural rhythm and cycle we were born to follow.

Whatever state of dis-ease you’re experiencing, no matter whether in a small or big way, leaning into nature will ease the dissonance. Re-wilding is always the medicine.