A Sacred Pause, New Beginnings & An Offering

An invitation + life updates from a Changing Woman

Blessings Beloveds,

I pray your hearts, minds and spirits can find presence and strength during these complex times.

It has been an important practice of mine over the last 3 years to maintain the practices that keep me centered- rooted in the Heart, rooted in Truth, rooted in the Divine- so that I may bear witness to the violence and suffering in a way that strengthens my capacity to take action as we build a more loving and Life-honouring way of being on this beautiful Earth we call home.

I pray you can remember and honour what keeps you connected.

I pray you find aligned and authentic ways to serve this moment through your presence.

I pray we all remember what unites us all, allow that light to fill our hearts and guide our action and way of being in this world at this time.

This newsletter holds an offering and some sweet updates from this life of mine. I hope you are able to receive whatever medicine you need from it ❤️

A Free Offering

This Saturday I’ll be in a live dialogue + Q&A with Steve Brett, co-founder of 3rd Space. We’ll cover:

• What the consciousness of domination is and its role in the relational crisis we are living through

• Pathways for individual and collective repair

• The power of embodied spirituality in cultural transformation

• How we build our capacity to midwife a regenerative (r)evolution

& so much more! There will be room for questions and space to connect live.

If this calls you, I’ll be happy to receive you. You can register below: https://3rd-space.org/sydney-searchwell-simpson/

A Sacred Pause for New Beginnings

About 3 weeks ago, I began to feel the call to pause.

This was important because many events were beginning to unfold that have offered me clarity on where the Heart’s Way is guiding me next. My time spent editing the Sacred Pathways episodes began to feel draining. All of the energy I had for weeks to edit my poetry manuscript halted. But amidst this, I could feel the call to be with old/new loves of mine:

I began to spend copious amounts of time in my garden - connecting to and creating with the herbs, flowers, vegetables and fruits that are now growing in abundance.

Wild strawberries gathered from my backyard (which made a delicious sugar-free wildberry lemon sorbet during the heat wave we've been having). I've been drying peonies (for an herbal steam with Motherwort), rose (for my upcoming birthday cake), strawberry leaves (super packed with vitamin c) and more. Outside of harvesting, the beauty and joy for me really rests in simply connecting to and caring for the plants. I find that wherever I am, I am able to receive the sweet love of these medicines because they know me as I know them. It makes all places a Home.

I began to return to ceremony, singing medicine and devotional music to the Earth, trance dancing and painting. I’ve spent whole mornings whirling as the Divine whispers, “It’s just you and Me.” I have felt my Heart remembering the bliss of openness and the necessity of my being in that state to serve the Divine in my fullest capacity.

One of my favourite things about Sema - a Sufi devotional ceremony- and the practice of whirling is that I am able to truly surrender to the movement when my Heart is focused on the Divine. If I get lost in my thoughts or in trying to order my spinning, I quickly stumble and lose my balance. But when I am truly centred, whether deep within myself or focused on my right hand raised to the sky- my surroundings disappear in a whirl and my own whirling happens naturally. I become completely grounded in my focus: the place we are all homeward bound to. The Divine calling us home. It reminds me of the line in the Qawaali song‘Man Kunto Maula’ “Enter the Heart, Melt therein. You and Me in sweet harmony”

I began to reconnect with the Sacred Feminine & the Mystic Path embedded in my Heart. She appears when I have truly surrendered to the flow of my movement in dance and my movement in this dance of Life. She has reminded of my gifts as a healer - gifts I’ve often kept to myself or within a small circle of people. I feel in my Heart I’m being called to deepen my trust in those gifts. To invite people, particularly women, into the many practices and points of connection that have allowed me to be who I am and how I am today.

My connection with the Moon is deepening. I’ve been calling myself a Changing Woman lately. I can’t even predict where my Soul will call me next, but that’s also what I wished for: to never lose hope of the endless possibilities within me to serve Life however I can. So the path of endless change and evolution chose me and I trust that. There’s something wild about this energy that I love.

I’ve felt profound healing in surrendering to this pause. To the strengthening sisterhood that has emerged with new and old friends. To my communion with the Earth - mirroring my deepening communion with God. Clarity has unfolded from uncertainty again in that eternal cycle - a path I used to fear, but now choose to embrace to truly know and experience my unity with the Sacred Mystery we are embedded in.

It’s one thing to surrender. It’s another thing to trust.

I’ve received the guidance to place a pause on the Sacred Pathways episodes.

I don’t know what this means and I don’t need to. I’m trusting that this pause has its place in the greater unfoldment of things.

I feel that this platform is evolving in new ways - aligned with the direction my Heart has revealed to me: more healing offerings with the gifts of plants, more expression of the Sacred Feminine, more devotional expressions (I’ve been making music lately and it has been such play for me!). More collaborations in the direction of the project I’ve been dreaming up for the past year. More of what is true - here and now, unfolding as effortlessly as the whirl when my focus is clear in both surrender and trust.

I’m not forcing something into creation because I trust in the promise of its arrival through my being in the present moment. I can feel the energy of what wishes to emerge and it is absolutely divine… So I will listen as I am guided, like a Mother’s body to her child, to nourish the inevitability of what wants to emerge from me in this moment.

I’ll keep sharing here in the Substack newsletter because there is beauty in sharing the great unfoldment of whatever is to come. It helps show you all that I am and will always be in process and that the magic of the journey is right here.

Not in a pre-determined destination.

Not in a fixed outcome.

But in the eternally unfolding present moment. This is where I want to be. It is where the Beloved is.

You and me, God. Just You and me.

the opening of my current journal: "like a River always finds Her course, I, too, will find and be found by mine"