Gabija is the Lithuanian goddess of fire and specifically the fire of the home, the hearth… She’s the protector of the house and the family inside it. Her name comes from Lithuanian word gaubti, which means “to cover” or “to protect”. So, her name literally means the one who covers…

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The Intricacies of Gabija

~ She’s barely written down. Gabija appears in a list of Lithuanian gods by a Christian theologian, Jan Łasicki, in 1615 and that’s about it for the old written record!!! Everything else about her lives in folklore, passed down through women’s hands and mouths. I think it is soo beautiful that Gabija survived because we kept her going by sacred sisterhood…

~ She was the fire itself. Gabija wasn’t “in” the hearth the way a goddess might live in a temple. The fire was her and she was treated like a living creature… Every evening the woman of the house would cover the glowing coals with ashes, meaning “laying the fire to bed” so it wouldn’t wander off in the night & also so that Gabija could feel safe and honoured.

~ She shapeshifts. Gabija can appear as a cat, a stork, a rooster or a woman dressed in red. If you’ve ever felt a strange sense of presence in your kitchen, take it as you will, hehe

~ She loves to bathe. People sometimes left a bowl of clean water near the hearth so Gabija could wash herself. Fire and water, side by side...

~ She has boundaries. The folklore is clear that people who disrespected fire by spitting or stamping on it risked Gabija “going for a walk”, which meant burning down their house… Her essence is a duality of protective mother and also the fire that doesn’t get disrespected! (This tradition was prominent in my household growing up, from a young age I was told to show & give respect to our fire)

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~ The fire used to be communal. Before it moved into the home, a holy fire was kept in tribal sanctuaries on hills and riverbanks, guarded constantly by priests/priestesses and extinguished and rekindled once a year at the midsummer festival. Over time that sacred fire moved indoors, so its care became the woman of the house’s responsibility. The fire of the whole community moved into the hands of women in their own kitchens, isn’t it fascinating and magical?

~ She was passed down at weddings. A bride was given fire from her mother’s hearth so Gabija could give the new family a good beginning. Fire carried from one house to another, mother to daughter. Today the hearth is usually a small one made of clay. Mother places a tea light inside it, lights it and hands it to her daughter, or to both newlyweds together to carry into their new home! (I have witnessed this tradition myself many times, and I want to bring it to my own wedding too!)

~ She got a Christian makeover. Around early February, Lithuanians used to offer bread to Gabija and keep a piece at home as protection against house fires. That tradition later got attached to St. Agatha’s day. The bread was tucked into the foundations of new houses, put in beehives and even tied to the plough (I have seen, heard & witnessed this happening in smaller Lithuanian villages up to this day! My grandmother used to actively honour St. Agatha’s day & give me a piece of sacred Agotos Duona (Agatha’s Bread) as a protection talisman to walk around with. As my grandmother is no longer with us, I still have a few pieces left of this sacred bread, now as a keepsake, of all her wisdom she passed on to me).

Why She Matters Right Now

It’s getting dark early and getting cold, so a lot of us do the opposite of what Gabija teaches. We either push through on fumes, or we burn out and feel like our fire has gone out…

Gabija didn’t blaze all night, she nurtured the fire. The embers were covered, kept alive, protected, ready to be woken in the morning… So my dear reader, this is your reminder that winter isn’t about burning bright, it’s about keeping the coal alive under the ash…

So how do we embody her?

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Cover your fire, don’t put it out. Rest is not the same as giving up, you’re allowed to go quiet and slow while still keeping something glowing underneath…

Be the keeper of your own fire. In the old homes the woman decided what fed the fire and what didn’t. What are you feeding right now? What are you letting spit on your flame?

Protect the hearth. That means your home, but also your energy, your time and your yes. Gabija has boundaries and so can you!

Feed the warmth. Cook something real, share bread, make your space glow… Hospitality was her thing, so was keeping people close to the fire!

Wear red, light a candle, sit by the fire. Small, but she’s a goddess of small, daily, repeated acts of care.

A Simple Ritual To Honour Gabija At Home

Traditionally her offerings were bread, salt and clean water. Herbs weren’t a documented part of her worship as far as I can find, so I’ve added those below as a modern layer, using plants that already belong to Baltic land and tradition. Take what feels right, leave what doesn’t resonate!

You’ll need:

• a candle (or your fireplace, if you have one)

• a small piece of bread

• a pinch of salt

• a small bowl of clean water

• optional: dried juniper, thyme or rosemary

1. Prepare the hearth. Tidy the space where you’ll work. This is her home, so make it feel cared for

2. Set the offerings. Place the bread, salt and water near the flame. The water is for her to wash, the bread and salt are for her to eat

3. Light the fire. As you light the candle (or sit by the fire), say: “Gabija, mother of fire, keeper of this home, I welcome you.” Don’t be afraid to use your own words btw!

4. Add the herbs (optional). Crumble a little dried juniper, thyme or rosemary into the flame (or fireplace). Juniper is deeply Baltic and traditionally used for protection and cleansing, thyme stands for courage and inner strength (perfect for keeping your fire alive through the dark months) and rosemary is the herb of remembrance, which makes it a lovely way to honour your ancestors at Samhain!

5. Speak to her. Tell her what you want to keep alive this winter: Be specific: so maybe a project, a relationship, your own energy? Then Gabija, what are you covering up for now? What are you resting? What are you tending?

6. Offer the salt. Sprinkle a pinch toward the flame (around the candle or next to the fireplace, thank her for protecting the home

7. Lay the fire to bed. When you’re done, blow out the candle or let the fireplace burn for as long as you want. When you want to close the space whisper: “Gabija, now rest, but stay…”

8. Return the offerings. Leave the bread outside for birds or the earth, pour the water onto a plant or the ground.

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Come & Sit By The Fire With Us

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If this stirred something in you, I’d love for you to join me this Sunday 1st November for Wild Ancestry: A Samhain Gathering for Women When the Veil Is Thin, which I’m hosting with the wonderful !

It’s one hour online on Zoom (11am Pacific / 7pm UK). We’ll gather around a virtual fire for ancestral stories, Celtic and Lithuanian mythology, tarot and oracle readings and a simple Samhain ritual you can take home. will share Celtic traditions and I’ll open the door to Lithuanian mythology and the old pagan ways… No experience needed and the contribution is donation-based, so give what feels right…

Bring something warm to drink, light a candle and come as you are!

JOIN US HERE

Something in me exhales when the light goes low and golden, when the leaves start letting go & when the evenings pull us back indoors, back inward, back to the fire. This is the season where my witchy side wakes up properly, hehe. It’s the season where the veil feels thin, the dreams get louder and the ancestors seem to lean a little closer to the edge of the room…

It is the perfect time to slow down and honour where we come from. So today I want to take you down, quite literally, to the ground beneath your feet, to meet the Lithuanian goddess who is that ground!

Who is Žemyna?

Žemyna is the Lithuanian goddess of the earth. Her name comes straight from žemė, the Lithuanian word for earth, so when we say her name we are really saying “Earth”. She is the mother goddess of the fertile, dark, moist soil, the one who nourishes everything that grows, every human, plant and animal. Her name shows up in written records as far back as the 1500s, in the writings of Martynas Mažvydas and later Jan Łasicki. Sadly, what we have now are fragments, echoes and folk memory. I always find that a bit heartbreaking and a bit beautiful, like piecing together a letter that survived a fire…

What I love most about Žemyna is that she holds both sides. She is the goddess of life and she is also tied to death. Everything born of the earth returns to the earth, so she is where we come from and where our ancestors rest. In autumn, when the world is being composted back into the soil, that feels like the most honest kind of devotion you could offer…

What our ancestors actually did

Here is what has been passed down about how Lithuanians and other Baltic people honoured her.

They kissed the earth. Marija Gimbutas wrote that, until quite recently, people kissed the ground like a human mother, morning and evening. It was almost like a short prayer of thanks, with the acknowledgement that one day we all return to her.

They poured her a drink. Every celebration began with an invocation to Žemyna and a libation. Starting with the head of the household, each person thanked the earth and poured out a ladle of beer onto the ground.

They fed her. Offerings of food (mostly grains) were laid on the ground or tossed into flowing water. In the spring, bread baked from the last harvest was buried in the field before sowing, so the new year began by giving something back. Even scraps from the feast were returned to the earth, burned or buried.

They honoured her at birth. When a child was born, offerings were made to Žemyna, usually alongside Laima, the goddess of fate and luck. The earth was there at the very beginning of a life.

They treated the soil as sacred. No Baltic person would spit on the ground, curse it or strike it, because the ground was the goddess herself. I think about that a lot when I’m out walking, actually!

A small ritual to reconnect with Žemyna this autumn

What follows is my own interpretation. It’s rooted in the old practices above and I’ve woven in what feels right for The Wild Medeina. Take what resonates and change the rest, you’re the priestess of your own ritual.

What you’ll need: a patch of real earth (a garden, a park, a woodland edge, even a plant pot will do), a small offering and something to write on (a fallen leaf works beautifully as your paper!)

The offerings. Choose one or a few, whatever calls you: ale, milk or a herbal tea to pour out, a piece of bread to bury or leave for the birds and creatures, or a handful of seeds or a piece of fruit.

1. Go at dusk or dawn. The old kisses to our mother Earth were given morning and evening, those in-between hours where everything softens. Go outside, take your shoes off if you can and stand or kneel on the ground. Take three slow breaths and feel your weight being held.

2. Greet her. Place your hands flat on the earth. Say her name out loud “Žemyna” and say it the way you’d say it to your own mother, let it be soft and filled with gratitude.

3. Give thanks. Name what the earth has given you this year. The food, the shelter, the people, the growth, the hard lessons too. Say it aloud, even if it feels a bit odd at first, gratitude was the heart of her worship!

4. Pour and feed. Pour your libation onto the ground, slowly. Bury your bread or place your offering at the base of a tree or beside a stone. This is the giving back part, we take from her all year, so now we return something. (!! Please keep your portions small, because we don’t want to waste food, half a handful of oats or grains is plenty!)

5. Compost your shadow. This is where the wild woman work comes in. On your leaf, write one thing you’re ready to let rot: a belief, a pattern, a grief, an old story about who you have to be. Autumn is the earth’s great composting season, so nothing is wasted. Even the heavy things become soil for what grows next. Bury the leaf and tell Žemyna you trust her to transform it.

6. Kiss the earth. Bow down and kiss the ground, or touch your forehead to it, or press your palm to your lips and then to the soil. As the old prayers did, thank her and acknowledge that one day you’ll return to her too (it sounds heavy, but I find it strangely comforting…)

7. Call in your ancestors. Because she is the earth, she is also where our ancestors rest. Say the name of someone who came before you, a grandmother, a great-grandmother, a woman whose name you never learned… Ask them to stand with you. Sit for a moment and listen…. Sometimes there’s nothing, sometimes there’s everything.

When you’re ready, say thank you and walk away without looking back. Leave her to her work…

Why it works

We live so far from the soil now. We spend our days on pavements and carpets and screens…. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of us feel cut off from our own bodies, our own cycles and our own roots at the same time. Our ancestors didn’t separate those things. Honouring the earth, honouring the dead and honouring yourself were one practice.

When you kneel on the ground and say thank you, you’re doing something women have done for thousands of years, that’s what I mean by wild.

Come and honour your ancestors with and me!

On Sunday 1st November, at 7pm UK time (11am Pacific), (Wild Kin) and I are hosting Wild Ancestry: A Samhain Gathering for Women When the Veil Is Thin. It’s one hour on Zoom, around a virtual fire, with a warm drink in your hands and a candle lit if you fancy it!

join us here

So many of us feel the pull toward our ancestors but don’t know where to start. We’ve lost the stories, the songs and the old ways and trying to do it all alone can feel awkward or like you’re making it up. This gathering is here to ease that, you don’t have to piece it together by yourself!

Jess will share the wisdom and folklore of her Celtic ancestry and I’ll open the door to Lithuanian mythology and the old pagan ways, so together we’ll weave:

• Ancestral storytelling around our virtual fire

• Bite-sized Celtic and Lithuanian history, pagan traditions and myth

• Tarot and oracle readings for reflection and messages

• A simple Samhain ritual to honour our ancestors to take home and practise in your own time

• Sharing and conversation, with space for your own stories and questions

It’s donation based, so you give what feels right for you… Bring your curiosity, a cup of something warm and whoever you’d like to remember!

join us here

Until then, go and put your hands on the earth… She’s been waiting…

When women gather, the ancient ones awaken.

The moon remembers what the world made us forget.

Here, no woman must bleed alone to prove the depth of her becoming.

We bring our grief like offerings, our voices like spells, our bodies like forgotten temples.

And in the sacred hush between us, something shattered remembers itself whole.

Sister, I will witness your becoming without asking you to remain who you were.

For your wildness does not threaten mine.

We are not each other’s mirrors. We are each other’s remembering.

And together, we become the altar.

This is part two of a conversation Amy and I are having about why women need to gather, so go and read Amy’s article HERE as well.

~~~

There’s a stretch of life nobody really prepares you for: it’s the bit where your old identity is dissolving, but the new one hasn’t shown up yet. You’re not who you were, you’re not yet who you’re becoming… You’re just in between and it can feel like standing in a doorway with no one on either side.

I’ve been there. For me, it started when I realized my long-term relationship was falling apart and at almost the same time, that my 9-to-5 job was not the life I wanted. Two big parts of my identity were crumbling at once and I had no idea what was supposed to replace them.

Around then, I found divine feminine work, women’s embodiment and that whole side of a holistic-wild-witchy-untamed lifestyle. I found women’s circles gathering on the new and full moons, women talking openly about the menstrual cycle and the importance of balancing your masculine and feminine energies. It felt like stepping into a whole new world and I wanted to live there!!!! SO MUCH!!

If you’re in that in-between space right now, I want you to know something before we go any further: this is not a sign that something is wrong with you, it’s a threshold aaaandddddd thresholds are meant to be crossed with company!

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~ The thing that carried me through

When my old identity was dissolving, I did something that probably looked a bit odd from the outside. I went to workshops, I went to women’s circles, I turned up in rooms full of women I’d never met, again and again.

And I wasn’t doing it randomly (well ok somewhat randomly). I knew who I wanted to grow into. I could feel her, even though I couldn’t fully see her yet. So I went looking for the women who were already embodying that version of life. I wanted to sit in the same room as them. I wanted to watch how they spoke, how they took up space, how they handled hard things, how they laughed.

Something happened in those rooms that I still find hard to put into words. I felt seen… I felt understood in a way I hadn’t in months… I could walk in and say: “I had a really bad day because I released so much trauma, can you hold me?” and the answer was yes. Without awkwardness, without judgement, without me having to explain myself.

I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not. I didn’t have to have the next chapter figured out. I didn’t have to prove a single thing!!

The women there cheered me on, they held my presence, they let me be exactly where I was, half-shed and half-emerging, without needing me to be anything more polished…

Honestly, it felt like a beautiful kind of escapism. Not escaping from my life, but escaping into hope (if that makes sense??). In my darkest hours, those circles showed me that the life other women were living and weaving could be mine too. That is what kept me going!

~ Why the people closest to you might not get it

My friends and family at that time didn’t understand me the way the women in those circles did. BTW I want to be really clear: that’s not a criticism of them, they love me and they were doing their best.

But the people who knew who you were can’t always see who you’re becoming. They have a version of you in their heads and sometimes, without meaning to, they hold you to her. They’re loyal to the old you, because the old you is who they know how to love.

So when you’re changing, you can end up feeling oddly alone inside your own life. Surrounded by people, but not really witnessed by any of them.

That’s why I say this to every woman I talk to who’s standing in that liminal space between old and new: you need different rooms, new hobbies, new communities, new places where you can be around people who are walking the road you’re stepping onto.

In my opinion, you need witnesses to your becoming, so sometimes they live outside the circle you already have…

~ The most connected, most disconnected generation

I know how cliché this sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway, because it’s true. We are the most “connected” we have ever been and also the most disconnected. We can message anyone, anywhere, at any hour. We can watch strangers live their lives in real time & yet so many of us are quietly sitting with the same feeling:

I have friends, but I have nobody I can fall apart in front of.

I’m always the one holding everyone else, and no one is holding me.

Everyone thinks I’ve got it together, so I stopped telling them when I don’t.

I want you to hear me: Women were never designed to carry everything alone. For most of human history, we gathered. Around fires, in kitchens, at wells, in the red tent, in the circle. We held each other through births, deaths, heartbreaks and becomings and somewhere along the way we forgot that this was normal!!

So consider this your wake-up call! Come and gather with us, come and allow yourself to be vulnerable, you will feel so much lighter!!

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~ What a circle gives you that scrolling never will

Here’s what I’ve found, again and again:

• You get to stop performing. In a real circle, nobody’s grading you

• You get mirrored. You see parts of yourself reflected in other women’s stories, so suddenly you feel less alone and less strange

• You learn tools. You leave with practices, rituals and ways of regulating your emotions that you can actually use

• You practise asking for what you need. That is a skill so many of us were never taught

• You remember your own power. There’s something that wakes up in a woman when she’s witnessed by other women, it’s magically ancient and it’s still there

~ This is why and I created Sister Sanctuary

Sister Sanctuary is a gathering of women meeting with the rhythm of the moon, as an invitation to pause, reflect, connect and begin again. It’s a safe space to come exactly as you are!! No fixing, no performing, no pretending. Just genuine connection and support, across generations and time zones, with women who are walking their own becoming…

We meet on the new moon and the full moon and each gathering follows its own theme. We light a candle, pull a card, ground ourselves with breath and movement, and then we open the circle for sharing. The sharing space is never recorded, so it stays a safe place to be honest! (The teaching and ritual part is recorded, so if you can’t make it live, you won’t miss out)

Our next gathering is the Taurus full moon:

🌕 Sunday 25th October, 7pm UK / 2pm Panama ONLINE ON ZOOM

JOIN US HERE

If you’ve been the strong one for too long, if you’re standing in the in-between and craving a place to be held for once, this is your invitation! Come as you are, bring your questions, your half-formed new self & we’ll hold the space!

and I talked about the turning of the seasons, what autumn can teach us about letting go and going inward, making space for hobbies and creativity, nourishing ourselves, seasonal food and even bringing a little witchy magic into the kitchen! We also explored the topic of boundaries, self-care and the difference between constantly giving from an empty cup and actually having the energy to give from a nourished place!

And, of course, we want to hear from you too!! Please tell us in the comments: What is your relationship with boundaries this autumn? What are you wanting to strengthen, protect or change? And if you’re feeling seasonal, share your favourite autumn ritual, recipe or little thing that makes this time of year feel magical to you! 🍂☕️

In this first (out of many future ones!) Substack lives, and I share a little bit of our own journeys and talk about how our connection with nature has shaped the work we do today: The Wild Call & The Wild Medeina.

We chat about what it actually means to be “wild”, why reconnecting with nature can help us reconnect with ourselves and how small, simple rituals can bring more presence, grounding and meaning into everyday life. We also shared some of our favourite autumn nature rituals!

And we want you to join the conversation too! While you watch, tell us in the comments: What does being wild mean to you? What’s your favourite ritual in nature? And what are you being called to release this season? 🍂

Come Get Sensual With Us 🖤

There is something fucking exhausting about constantly trying to be the “right” kind of woman: Soft, but not needy. Sexy, but not too much. Confident, but still palatable. Receptive, healed, magnetic, regulated, feminine, desirable… honestly, when did being a woman become another performance??

And maybe you’re tired of performing it too.

Because beneath all the talk about feminine energy, magnetism and becoming your highest self, there is often the same old question hiding underneath: “Am I doing this right?”

Eros asks a much more interesting question: “What do I actually want?”

Not what looks “feminine” or what makes you desirable or what Instagram tells you a sensual woman should look like. What makes you feel juicilllllyyyyyy alive?

Eros is bigger than sex, for me it’s the appetite, the pleasure…. Curiosity… Sensation... Creativity…. Desire…. Your body’s YES and your body’s NO. Choosing eros could mean putting on the ridiculous dress because you feel like it, buying the expensive strawberries, dancing in your kitchen, wanting more, wanting less, changing your mind, saying no, saying yes, following the little spark instead of immediately talking yourself out of it….

It is the part of you that doesn’t want to be managed into perfection, she wants to LIVE

And that is why we are doing the SHE CHOSE EROS, 14-day challenge, where we will be finding ways to bring eros into your daily life!!! We are starting tomorrow, btw, so nowwwww IS THE LAST CALLLLLL!!!

JOIN NOWWWW!!!

JOIN NOWWWW!!!

For 14 days, we’re getting out of our heads and back into the deliciously messy territory of body, desire, sensuality, pleasure, sexuality, boundaries, instincts and aliveness.

So this is your invitation, that maybeeee you need to become more yourself?

A little wilder. A little more particular. A little less available for things you don’t want. A lot more honest about what makes you feel alive??

So if you’ve been craving more body, more pleasure, more desire and a little beautiful chaos, this is your invitation!!

Stop performing her!! Start feeling her!!

The doors close tonight, LAST CALL TO JOIN SHE CHOSE EROS

JOIN NOWWWW!!!

Agne & Simone x

Let’s start with the truth: life is hard.

It is, we know it. and I know it and you know it too. There are seasons that crack you open: grief, burnout, heartbreak, endings, identity crises, the long grey months where you’re just getting through. We have all been in the dark, and some of us are still crawling our way out of it.

The annoying thing is tho, that sometimes you can do all the “right” things and still feel like a very polite ghost in your own life. You can understand your patterns, do the practices, know your triggers, work on yourself, set the boundaries, have the breakthroughs and still feel strangely disconnected from the woman underneath it all.

You’re functioning, you’re self-aware & you’re probably doing better than you give yourself credit for!! But somewhere underneath all that healing, there’s a quiet thing so thick you can hear it…. (drumroll please…) it is numbness. Somewhere along the way, your body learnt that certain parts of you were safer when they stayed switched off. Things like: your desire or your pleasure… Sometimes your anger, your voice. The wild little instincts that might make you inconvenient, too much, too loud, too sexual, too fucking alive….???

So you learnt the right smile, just the right amount of softness… How to be desirable without being demanding, feminine without being threatening, good without being inconvenient… You know the gist: Never too loud, never too hungry, never asking for too much, not even a peep!!

So slowly, quietly, the fire went underground, because somewhere along the way, you learned that being wanted was safer than being fully alive. SOOOO maybe that’s why more fixing isn’t always the answer, maybe you don’t need another part of yourself to dissect or another thing to improve before you’re finally allowed to enjoy your own juicy life??

Maybe the part of you that went underground, she wants to feel good again??

What if the way out of the dark isn’t more fixing… but more PLEASURE? 🍑

Stay with me here!

What if you’ve done enough fixing? What if the next chapter of your healing is more juicy life?? A body that finally gets to feel good on purpose??

This is eros. And no, it is not just sex (although, hello, yes, her too 😏). EROS IS A LIFE FORCE, it’s the pulse under everything: it’s creativity, devotion, hunger, delight... It’s the thing that makes you want to sing in the car, write the book, dance in the kitchen, wear the red lipstick, say the true thing and mean it!!

Eros is what the dark was protecting all along & she’s ready to come outtttt!!!!

Imagine this 🌹

Imagine waking up and your body being the first place you go, before the phone, before the world’s demands… You stretch like a cat who owns the house…

Imagine your voice dropping lower and slower, because nobody is rushing you and you’ve stopped apologising for taking up space…

Imagine walking into a room and not scanning for how to be liked, you just ARRIVE… Magnetic without performing, chasing or proving a single thing…

Imagine desire coming back… A song that makes your hips move, oil on your skin feeling like a luxurious Cleopatra ritual, five minutes barefoot on the earth, while you sip your morning coffee, a meal you taste with your whole soul & being vocal about it!!!

Imagine making love, making art, making money, making dinner, all with the same lit-up hum running through you, a workday that has juice in it..

That is a woman who chose eros… & she didn’t choose it once, she chooses it again & again in the unglamorous middle of a real life with real deadlines and real laundry and real boring tasks

The 14 days 🔥

Over the last few months, and I have been taking you through the wild & dark feminine, rage and shadow, sensuality and the funeral of performed femininity. We’ve gone deep and we’ve gone dark. & NOW?? We’re taking it out of the talking and INTO YOUR BODY!! hehe!!!

SHE CHOSE EROS is a 14-day challenge held in a private community, to help you to stop performing femininity & start living with eros & sensuality!

Here’s what you get:

• a daily voice note or video from us, a small embodied practice that fits into REAL life

• tiny rituals to bring pleasure, creativity and fire back into your ordinary days

• a circle of women doing it with you, because the fire burns brighter when it’s witnessed

• 14 days of reclaiming the juicy, sassy, erotic part of youuuuu

Why are we doing this in a supportive sisterhood community? because desire is contagious and because it is so much easier to stay devoted when other women are showing up beside you. You’re not doing this alone in your bedroom wondering if you’re “doing eros right”, we’re all in it!!!💋

I AM IN!!!!!

Is this for you?

This is for you if:

🖤 you’ve done the healing and you’re ready for the living
🖤 you feel numb, flat or like you’re performing softness
🖤 you want to be magnetic without trying so hard
🖤 you’re tired of being “good” and ready to be ALIVE
🖤 you know there’s more juice in life and you want it back

THE DOORS ARE OPENNNNN

A few women have already stepped through and we can feel the energy gathering!!! If something in your body just went “ahh yesssss” while reading this, that’s your whole body sacred “yes”!!!

I AM IN!!!!!

She chose eros… & then she chose it again 🔥

with love, fire and a little bit of naughtiness,
The Wild Medeina &

Eros is about being the woman who wants her own life, who chooses pleasure in all areas of her life!!

That’s exactly what we’re bringing into SHE CHOSE EROS challenge: 14 days of pleasure, rituals, juicy experiments, creativity, desire, sisterhood and little daily invitations to choose yourself again. The vibe inside is not about trying to become some perfectly divine feminine version of yourself, it is all about just getting curious about what makes you feel alive, juicy and fucking good!!! hehe!!!!

🔥 Join the waitlist, doors are opening soon!!!

JOIN WAITLIST HERE

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We talked about numbness as protection & hiding, small rituals that bring us back into pleasure, reawakening desire through movement, nature, beauty and creativity, and finding YOUR own way of feeling wild and juicy instead of copying someone else’s version of femininity!!! Because choosing Eros is about discovering what actually lights you up!! 🔥

And this is exactly what we’ll be exploring inside She Chose Eros our 14-day challenge to bring more pleasure, desire, creativity and juiciness into your everyday life, together with a community of women doing the same!!! We had quite a few women join the waitlist, so hop on and let’s get juicy together!!!!

JOIN THE WAITLIST

Subscribe now

We talked about Eros as something far bigger than sex: pleasure, creativity, curiosity, sensuality, aliveness annndddddd learning to actually feel inside your own life again!!

Because choosing Eros is choosing to be have the juicy life 🤤💦

This is exactly what we’re bringing into SHE CHOSE EROS our upcoming 14-day challenge filled with rituals, pleasure, Eros and juicy little rebellions to help you make it something you actually LIVE, not just something you talk about!!!

🔥 Join the waitlist NOW, doors are opening soon!!!

JOIN WAITLIST HERE

She is wildly self-aware. She has done the healing. She knows her attachment style, her wounds, her patterns, her triggers… She has read the books, listened to the podcasts, saved the Instagram posts, filled journals with reflections that would make a therapist proud…

But she still doesn’t feel free…

Somewhere along the way, modern women were taught that healing lives in the mind. You know the overly masculine approach to life: think differently, reframe it, analyse it and commit to it in a 75-hard-challenge way… We became collectors of wisdom & information, but forgot that the feminine has never lived only in thought, she has always lived in the body…

Your body has been remembering everything your mind has been trying to move on from.

She remembers the conversation where you swallowed the words you wanted to say… She remembers every time you smiled when you wanted to scream… She remembers the years you made yourself smaller so other people felt comfortable... She remembers the pressure to be the good girl, the strong woman, the independent one who doesn’t need anyone… I can keep going for hours…

Your shoulders remember

Your jaw remembers

Your hips remember

Your breath remembers

And that is why sometimes you cry without knowing why. Why a song cracks something open inside you or why you walk into the forest and suddenly feel like you can breathe again…

The body has her own language. She doesn’t communicate through perfect sentences, she speaks through sensation, instinct, tears, goosebumps, trembling, warmth, softness. She whispers long before she ever screams…

I think this is one of the greatest wounds of the modern wild woman, she has become disconnected from her own animal nature.

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We’ve been taught to live from the neck up, to trust logic before instinct and productivity before pleasure. We spend entire days inside glowing screens, disconnected from seasons, disconnected from our breath, disconnected from the quiet pulse underneath all the noise that says come back!

The wild woman appears when you stop abandoning yourself.

This is why I keep returning to Medeina, the ancient Lithuanian goddess of the forest, because she reminds me of a truth we’ve forgotten. The forest doesn’t overthink whether it’s worthy or wolves don’t ask permission before they howl or rivers don’t apologise for changing direction… Nothing in nature is constantly performing its existence!! It simply belongs, it simply just IS.

So, I wonder how different life would feel if women remembered that they belong in their bodies before they belong anywhere else…

Sometimes healing looks like shaking your arms until the tension leaves your fingertips… Sometimes it looks like letting your hips move without worrying how they look and maybe sometimes it looks like covering a blank page with colour because words have reached their limit…

~ Movement has always been the medicine

~ Creativity has always been the ritual

~ & both are ancient languages of the feminine…

An Invitation Into Your Body

This upcoming Sunday (October 4th) and I are opening a space called Colour Her Wild: PULSE!

Sunday, October 4th

7:00pm UK · 10:00pm Dubai

Online on Zoom

$10

SIGN UP HERE NOW!

For one hour, we’re creating a space for women to stop carrying everything alone!!

We’ll begin with a guided movement practice to help you release stress, pressure or whatever you’ve been holding in your body, then we’ll flow into an intuitive art experience where colour becomes a way of expressing what words can’t quite reach… We’ll finish by bringing movement and creativity together so you leave feeling more connected to yourself than when you arrived…

You don’t need to be “creative” to join, you only need a body, a few sheets of paper, something that makes colour, a glass of water and enough space to move!

And can I lovingly challenge you for a second? $10 is basically one oversized Starbucks coffee…. One drink you’ll finish in twenty minutes OR one hour devoted entirely to yourself that your body might remember for much longer??

I’m not saying coffee isn’t a good option, I do love a good coffee, what I’m saying is that women spend money every day on things that help them keep going, while convincing themselves they can’t spend $10 on something that helps them come home.

If you’ve been feeling disconnected from yourself, emotionally heavy, creatively blocked or like you’ve been living from your head instead of your heart and body, we think this hour was made for you…

Come meet us inside Colour Her Wild. PULSE

Sunday, October 4th

7:00pm UK · 10:00pm Dubai

Online on Zoom

$10

SIGN UP HERE NOW!

SIGN UP HERE NOW!

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In America and across Europe, she was once spoken about like a phenomenon. A groundbreaking archaeologist, a scientist who cracked open thousands of years of prehistory and made us look again at what we thought we knew about civilisation, about power, about women & yet in Lithuania, her own homeland, she was and still sometimes is dismissed as a “bad feminist.“You know the gist: too much, too witchy, too unfiltered, does not fit in the patriarchal box…

As a Lithuanian woman myself, building something rooted in our ancestral lineage, I couldn’t not write about her, so let’s dive in. Who was she?

Marija Gimbutas is best known for what’s called the goddess hypothesis (sometimes called the old Europe hypothesis): the theory that prehistoric, pre-Indo-European societies across Europe were peaceful, nature connected and centred around goddess worship before patriarchal, hierarchical culture came in and buried it. It’s one of the most influential and most controversial ideas in 20th century archaeology.

So this is her story:

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A childhood soaked in folklore and science

Marija was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1921, into a family of physicians, both of her parents were doctors: highly intellectual, highly educated people. Even though her parents were deeply science-based people, they were just as devoted to Lithuanian folklore, countryside traditions and paganism. They loved the land, they respected the old ways & that deep love & respect for folklore and nature got passed straight into her.

Growing up, she was surrounded by it all: the neighbours, the friends, the household help, everyone around her seemed to want to talk about Lithuanian folklore, myth and tradition. Her whole family carried this pull to bring these stories out into the public, to keep them alive, to make sure they weren’t forgotten.

Her parents were also quite political: they believed in Lithuanian independence and they lived by that belief. Her father wrote articles and books on Lithuanian folklore and was involved in local newspapers covering folklore, archaeology and the Lithuanian language (by the way, this mattered more than it might sound like, because from 1864, the Lithuanian language itself had been banned under Russification policy). Marija’s parents were part of the knygnešiai, the Lithuanian book smugglers, illegally carrying banned Lithuanian-language books across the border, because they believed the language could not be allowed to die!! It was, in Lithuanian history, one of the most quietly heroic acts a person could do!!

Then she lost her father, young… She kept writing to him after he died, in her diary, telling him she’d carry on his work, that she wouldn’t let it stop just because he wasn’t there anymore.

War, hiding & a thesis she couldn’t defend

Marija went on to study archaeology and in 1942 she completed her master’s thesis at the University of Vilnius on burial practices in the Lithuanian Iron Age, but 1943 brought the closure of Lithuania’s universities under Nazi occupation & she wasn’t able to defend further work there.

Also in 1941, the Soviets began mass deportations to labour and concentration camps, her family had to hide. Marija hid in the forests to avoid being taken & also during the occupation, her family also helped shelter Lithuanian Jews, another quietly enormous act of courage, tucked into a life that was already asking so much of her…

Her family moved around Lithuania, then fled to Austria, then Germany, as things kept changing around them, she kept trying to get into universities wherever she landed. Eventually, in 1946, she completed her PhD in archaeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, her dissertation focused on prehistoric burial rites in Lithuania.

In 1949, unable & unwilling to return to Lithuania, now swallowed by the Soviet Union, she emigrated to the United States with her husband and children.

America: orange juice, hotel rooms & Harvard’s cold shoulder

When she arrived in America, her husband moved to a different city for work. Marija, meanwhile, took on non-qualified jobs just to get by: working in an orange-squeezing shop, cleaning hotel rooms. She wanted, desperately, to be doing serious academic and archaeological work, instead she was doing manual labour and she described herself, in her own words, as drowning.

She eventually found her way into Harvard, working through the Peabody Museum from 1950 to 1963, but she didn’t experience it as some warm welcome into the ivory tower. She described Harvard as discriminating and snobbish and she didn’t feel like she was treated as an equal, because she was a woman in a field that simply wasn’t built to hold her as one.

She was candid, too, about the tension in her personal life. She felt boxed in by what was expected of her as a wife and mother, at a time when that was supposed to be enough for a woman. Marija Gimbutas wanted an academic life, fully, and she said so plainly: she felt she couldn’t have both, not the way things were set up. Her marriage eventually ended in divorce, her husband hadn’t supported the path she was so determined to walk…

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Digging up the goddess

In 1963 she joined UCLA, eventually becoming chair of European archaeology in 1969 and she stayed there until her retirement in 1990, this is where the work she’s now known for really took shape.

Between 1967 and 1980, she directed major excavations across southeastern Europe: sites in Bosnia, North Macedonia (Anzabegovo) and Greece (Sitagroi and Achilleion). She dug in places where other archaeologists assumed there was nothing left to find & she kept turning up artefacts of daily life, religion and spirituality, including hundreds of woman-shaped figurines. This is where her goddess hypothesis started to take form: the idea that prehistoric “old Europe” had been a goddess-centred, gynocentric culture, peaceful, nature connected, women honouring, before it was overtaken by a patriarchal, hierarchical, warlike Indo-European culture.

In 1974, she published the book that made her both famous and notorious: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. It inspired women’s movements around the world & it also made her a target. Even though she was a respected, established scientist, the moment she started speaking about a divine, goddess-worshipping Europe, some of her peers turned on her: calling her a hippie, an angry feminist, a woman making things up out of nowhere. She went from credible archaeologist to “witchy woman with a theory” almost overnight, in some circles…

She kept going anyway…

Marija Gimbutas’s core argument, underneath all of it, was this: patriarchal hierarchy leads to the destruction of civilisations, so she believed prehistoric societies that lived close to nature and close to a goddess-centred spirituality lived in real harmony and that the loss of that harmony was the loss of something essential. She was vocal that women being suppressed and overused is one of the deepest wounds in the world, that Western philosophy left no true space for womanhood, that it was built by and for men & that women had been quietly erased from intellectual and academic life for centuries, she was, understandably, furious about it & she said so!!

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Never stopped being Lithuanian, never stopped being political

Even from America, Marija never let go of Lithuania. While her homeland sat under Soviet control, she stayed loudly, vocally critical of what that was doing to Lithuanian culture, because under Soviet rule, academics and anyone connected to independent thought were specifically targeted. Staying in touch with family back home could put them at risk, she went long stretches unable to speak with her own mother because of it, she described life under Soviet occupation as suffocating, a culture that couldn’t breathe…

So she used her freedom in America to speak. She ran gatherings, seminars and circles on Lithuanian language, philosophy, psychology, folklore… She wrote for Lithuanian newspapers. Marija Gimbutas drew a hard, clear line between Soviet-style archaeology and Western archaeology and she wasn’t afraid to say so, politically, publicly. In 1964 and again in 1968, she lectured at Vilnius University, which, under the political conditions of the time, was no small or safe thing to do.

She put enormous weight on Lithuanian folklore, ethnology and paganism, and she pushed people, Lithuanians especially, not to let it be forgotten…

The translation from the picture: “Here comes Marija, wearing her long dress made from a single piece of fabric, almost like a toga. She stretches her arms wide to both sides in greeting. At that moment, the sunlight falls directly onto her chest. She truly looked like a goddess. And she had an incredibly enchanting way of speaking.”

Illness & writing without a filter

In 1981, she was diagnosed with lymphoma.

In 1988 (published 1989), she released The Language of the Goddess and by this point, she’d never really filtered herself much to begin with, but now she wrote completely unfiltered, this was her, fully, on the page.

Even at the height of her renown, some archaeologists dismissed her as strange, witchy & weird: a woman conjuring concepts out of nowhere rather than a scientist & yet she was also deeply respected by others, including the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who became a close intellectual companion of hers and wrote the foreword to a later edition of The Language of the Goddess. Campbell compared the importance of her work to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

On 2nd February 1994, Marija Gimbutas died in Los Angeles, she was reburied soon after in Petrašiūnai cemetery in Kaunas, Lithuania, brought home, in the end, to the land her entire life’s work had circled back to, again and again…

Why she matters

I think about Marija Gimbutas and I think about every woman who’s ever been told she’s too much: too intense, too weird, too political, too spiritual, too loud about the things that matter to her… Marija was dismissed by some of her own people even as she was being studied in universities across the world. She lost her father young, hid in a forest to survive, cleaned hotel rooms while carrying a PhD’s worth of unspoken ambition, got divorced because her husband couldn’t hold space for who she was becoming and kept going anyway… All the way to a body of work that changed how we think about goddess worship, prehistoric matriarchy and our own ancestral roots.

For Lithuanians, her life is a thread straight back to our own suppressed language, our own buried folklore, our own pagan roots that were never really gone, just quieted… For the work I do around Baltic mythology, shadow work and feminine sovereignty, she’s basically an ancestor of the whole mission: someone who insisted, decades before it was fashionable, that the goddess was always there, underneath everything, waiting to be dug back up…

~~~

It matters that we remember women like Marija Gimbutas, because every culture has its own Marija Gimbutas, buried a little deeper, waiting for someone to finally say her name out loud, remembering her is how we remember all of them…

~~~

If you’re in a dark-nights-of-the-soul stage of your life, the kind where nothing makes sense and you can’t find your way back to yourself, that’s the goddesses asking you to go under, not around…

I work 1:1 with women in exactly this place, using Lithuanian mythology and rituals to help you meet what’s asking to be met in the dark, instead of rushing back to the light before you’re ready… Žemyna (Lithuanian goddess of the Earth) doesn’t rush the seeds & neither should you!

BOOK 1-1 SESSIONS HERE

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and I spoke about why so many women are feeling disconnected, overwhelmed and out of rhythm with themselves and how returning to the cycles of the moon, nature and sisterhood can become a way home…

We talked about the recent eclipse energy, the power of gathering in women’s circles, the wisdom of living in tune with the lunar seasons & why rituals don’t have to be complicated to transform the way we move through life. We also shared our own stories of how women’s circles carried us through some of our biggest life transitions and why we’re so passionate about creating this space together…

If you’ve been craving slower life pace, deeper conversations, more intention and a place where you don’t have to have it all figured out...

✨ Join Sister Sanctuary

Sister Sanctuary is our twice-monthly online women’s circle, gathering around every New Moon and Full Moon.

Inside you’ll find a space to pause, breathe and reconnect with yourself through gentle movement, journaling, seasonal rituals, lunar wisdom, mythology, goddess teachings, book club conversations and honest sharing with women from around the world!

OUR FIRST GATHERING IS SEPTEMBER 10TH, 2PM PANAMA TIME/ 8PM UK TIME ON ZOOM

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• The difference between true feminine empowerment and ego-driven performance

• Why social media has turned the dark feminine, wild feminine & soft feminine into aesthetics instead of lived experiences

• The danger of confusing archetypes with costumes and how femininity is deeply multidimensional

• How to find your own version of the wild and dark feminine instead of copying someone else’s expression

• The difference between authentic self-expression and seeking validation through the male gaze or external approval

• Why wildness is about grounded liberation and inner knowing

• Shadow work as the path back to authenticity: noticing where performance reveals an unhealed wound

• Healing isn’t linear, it’s layers, cycles & continuously returning to yourself

Listen to PART 1 HERE

Listen to PART 2 HERE

• Why women have been conditioned to fear their rage & rebellion

• The “good girl” conditioning and how it disconnects us from our instincts and voice

• Sacred rage as a guide for boundaries, truth and self-protection rather than something to suppress

• The link between shadow work and wildness: why you need both to reclaim your authentic self

• Reclaiming sensuality, sexuality and pleasure without shame or performance

• How conditioning shapes our relationships, desires & identity as women

• Practical rituals to reconnect with your body: rage pages, sensual movement, mirror work, etc

• Why your darkness is something to honour, integrate & embody

Listen to Part 1 HERE

Somewhere in the middle of all of that noise, you are supposed to figure out who the hell you actually are.

I don’t think your twenties are meant to be a perfectly executed decade. I think they are meant to be messy. Experimental. Sometimes wildly confusing/ exhilarating or maybe even absolutely shit… They are a decade of trying things on, throwing things away, changing your mind, discovering what makes you feel alive and slowly learning to distinguish your own voice from all the voices you inherited…

and I are writing this from two different places in life. She is sharing the wisdom she has gathered from her thirties, while I am writing from my own experience of moving through my twenties and discovering just how much can change when you stop trying to live the life you thought you were supposed to want.

Read her article HERE

So, if I could sit down with a woman somewhere in the middle of her twenties & give her six pieces of advice, these are the ones I would give her:

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1. Give yourself grace in the shitty seasons

There will be seasons of your twenties where you are absolutely thriving and there will be seasons where you genuinely have no fucking clue what you are doing. There will be endings, identity crises, heartbreaks, career changes, friendship shifts, financial uncertainty, loneliness, reinvention and periods where you feel like everyone else has somehow received a secret manual for adulthood that you clearly missed…

Give yourself grace in those seasons.

You do not need to turn every difficult period into a productivity challenge. You do not need to squeeze a lesson, a business idea, a glow-up or a five-year plan out of every painful experience. Sometimes you are simply going through something and your job is to get yourself through it with as much tenderness as you can.

Trust me, I learned this one the hard way.

There was a period of my life where I was shedding and releasing so much at once. I was leaving my job, I was leaving a previous relationship…. I was basically rebuilding my identity. I was trying to create a business from the ground up and figure out what the hell I was actually doing with my life. Everything familiar was falling away and instead of recognising that I was in an enormous transition, I kept demanding more from myself.

I became incredibly harsh with myself, to be perfectly honest, I slipped into this very rigid, overly masculine mode of I need to achieve this. I need to do this. I should be further ahead. I need to be better. I need to work harder.

Looking back, I can see how little grace I was giving myself. I was trying to build a completely new life while simultaneously punishing myself for not already knowing how to live it.

You are allowed to have shitty seasons

You are allowed to be tired

2. Be brave enough to question everything

Your twenties are a brilliant time to become deeply suspicious of the word should.

I think we inherit so many invisible rules without even realising it. You should go to university. You should get a stable job. You should climb the career ladder. You should buy a house. You should find a partner. You should settle down. You should be sensible. You should behave a certain way. You should want the things everyone around you seems to want… I could go on for hours…

But who decided that? And, more importantly, do you actually want it?

I questioned almost everything. I had a stable 9-5, I went to two universities, I got two university degrees…. On paper, I had followed a very recognisable path of being educated, employable and sensible anddddd then I started questioning the entire thing…

I questioned my career. My identity. My purpose. What success actually meant to me. What kind of life I wanted. What I believed about myself. What I believed about spirituality. What I believed about my soul. What kind of woman I wanted to become. So, eventually, I questioned the idea that I had to keep following the path I had already invested years into (which is terrrryyyfying may I add??).

I exchanged that certainty for the terrifying uncertainty of becoming a business owner and building my own brand, plus also because the work I was creating was centred around wildness, femininity, archetypes, embodiment and spirituality, there were plenty of people who thought it was strange, unrealistic or simply too woo-woo…

Sometimes not being understood is part of refusing to abandon yourself.

Question your parents. Question your friends. Question your industry. Question your relationship. Question your own beliefs. Question the version of yourself you have been performing for years.

Also I wanted to point out that you don’t have to rebel against everything simply for the sake of rebelling, but you do owe yourself the opportunity to ask: Is this actually mine? Or did I just inherit it? & that question can change your entire fucking life!!!!

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3. Get the fuck out of your comfort zone and find new people

If you are in your twenties and you don’t know what you want to do with your life, I would genuinely encourage you to stop putting so much pressure on yourself to figure it out intellectually. Go and try shit!

Take a class. Go to a workshop. Learn something you’ve never heard of. Join a community. Pick up a hobby. Go to an event by yourself. Try a different type of work. Volunteer. Learn a skill. Take yourself somewhere you’ve never been. Talk to people who live completely differently from you & no, I don’t mean you need to spend thousands of pounds doing some transformational retreat in Bali (that can help, no shade there, but it is not always accessible for people).

There are SO many free and affordable ways to experiment now. Libraries, community groups, free workshops, online communities, local events, volunteering, public talks, creative spaces. You don’t need a huge budget to become curious about your own life.

& remember: you don’t have to commit. You can try something and decide you hate it, you can take a class and never go back, now you know!!

Sometimes we think we need to know what we want before we start moving, but so much self-knowledge comes from experience… You learn what you love by doing things, you learn what you hate by doing things.

So fuck the comfort zone, you do not need to know where you’re going, just go somewhere new.

4. Stop waiting for confidence

This one is connected to the previous one because confidence doesn’t come from sitting at home thinking about how confident you would like to be… Trust me!!!

You have to do shit that scares you!!

Confidence is built through evidence. Every time you do something that makes your stomach flip and discover that you survived, you teach yourself something. Every time you speak even though your voice shakes, put your work out even though you’re terrified of judgement, walk into a room where you don’t know anyone, ask for what you want, leave something that isn’t right or take a chance without knowing the outcome, you collect another little piece of evidence that says: I can handle myself.

& I believe women, in particular, have been conditioned to wait until they feel completely certain before taking up space, you know the usual:

Be nice

Don’t be too loud

Don’t be too much

Don’t make people uncomfortable

Don’t be intimidating

Don’t speak unless you know you’re right

Don’t draw attention to yourself

For most of my life, I actually felt quite confident in my own bones, but I wasn’t necessarily using that confidence. I had been conditioned to be quiet, agreeable and well-behaved, so there was this strange contradiction inside me: people around me could see confidence in me that I wasn’t always consciously allowing myself to express.

I remember asking my friends at one point to describe me and soooo many of them said some version of: “You’re really confident, it just comes naturally to you, I don’t know how you’re not scared…”

The funny thing was, I was scared, I was scared all the time, I just didn’t always let the fear make my decisions & once I started understanding my conditioning, particularly the good girl conditioning I had absorbed, that contradiction finally made sense.

So don’t wait until you become some perfectly fearless woman, be wild while you’re scared, be feral while your voice shakes. My advice for you here is that you don’t need to become fearless, you just need to stop letting fear be the one holding the steering wheel…

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5. Pay attention to what makes you feel ALIVE

Your twenties are not just for figuring out what career will make you the most money, they are for figuring out what makes you feel like YOU.

So, pay attention to what lights you up… What makes you lose track of time. What you could talk about for hours. What makes you suddenly feel curious again. What makes you want to get out of bed. What makes you feel playful. What makes you feel connected to yourself.

& please don’t dismiss those things just because they aren’t immediately useful. I have fallen in love with some of the most random things…

Reading things that genuinely excite me. Workshops around wild femininity and mythology. Bookbinding. Fountain pens. Feather pens. Strange little creative interests that, on paper, probably look completely disconnected from the rest of my life, but they light me up & and that matters!!

When you follow those little sparks, you meet people who are also fascinated by those things, so you enter different communities & you discover new parts of yourself… One interest leads to another… A hobby can become a creative project » A creative project can become a career move » A random conversation can introduce you to someone who changes your entire trajectory…

You don’t know where the breadcrumb leads until you follow it.

So if you’re in your twenties, experiment with your life while you can & not because you have some magical deadline before thirty, but because your life is happening now, so don’t ask: What am I supposed to do?, ask: What makes me feel alive?

Then pay attention to the answer…

6. Don’t make yourself understandable or your wounds your identity

Stop trying so hard to become a woman everyone else understands.

Your twenties will probably involve a looooootttttt of becoming.

You will change your mind. You will outgrow friendships. You may change careers. You may leave relationships. You may discover beliefs that completely contradict what you were taught. You may become interested in things that your old self would have found ridiculous. You may disappoint people. You may surprise yourself.

So sometimes, when people around you don’t understand your changes, you’ll feel the urge to explain yourself…

To justify why you left, why you changed, why you don’t want the same things anymore, why you’re doing something unconventional, why you’ve become interested in something strange, why you’re not following the expected timeline….

Girl, you don’t need to make every stage of your becoming palatable to everyone around you!!!

Some people will only understand the version of you they’ve already met, so let them be confused & most importantly, you are allowed to become someone completely unexpected, even to yourself… You don’t have to remain loyal to an old version of yourself simply because she once made sense…

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So, if I could tell my twenty-something self anything...

I would tell her to stop rushing

Stop trying to have the answers before you’ve had the experiences

Stop measuring your life against someone else’s timeline

Stop thinking every detour is a mistake

Give yourself grace when you’re exhausted. Question what you’ve been handed. Go somewhere new. Meet people who challenge you. Try the things that make you curious. Do things badly. Be embarrassed. Change your mind. Follow the weird little sparks. Let yourself be scared. Speak anyway.

And above all, let yourself become… This is a genlte reminder to you, my dear reader, you do not need to emerge from your twenties as a perfectly healed, wildly successful, completely certain woman who has figured out her purpose and has a five-year plan colour-coded in Notion…

You get to be messy

You get to be contradictory

You get to change

You get to want something different next year

You get to walk away

You get to begin again

You get to discover that the life you were building isn’t actually the life you want & have the courage to build another one

So experiment wildly. Love deeply. Question relentlessly. Rest when you need to. Follow what makes your blood move. Let yourself be seen. Let yourself be misunderstood… & when the world hands you a script for who you are supposed to be, read it, question it and then, if it isn’t yours, burn the f thing!!!

And if you’re in your own season of becoming, this is exactly why I created Colour Her Wild with 🎨

It’s a 6-week journey blending Lama’s art therapy with my Wild Woman teachings, alongside embodiment practices, creativity, exploration and plenty of space to reconnect with the parts of yourself you may have forgotten. Together, we’ll explore what makes you feel passionate, playful, expressive and actually sensually alive, because you weren’t put on this earth just to be productive and get through the week…

If you’re craving more passion, joy, creativity and aliveness, this is your invitation to come back to yourself and colour outside the lines…

We begin September 5th. Only 8 spots available!! Come colour YOUR wild with us….🌈🔥

SIGN UP HERE

SIGN UP HERE

Sister Sanctuary asks for only THREE of them.

That’s it… Two gatherings, ninety minutes each, on (or around) the new moon and the full moon, which means we are asking you for 0.4% of your month. Less than half a percent of your time, given back to the only relationship most of us have quietly stopped tending: the one with ourselves.

I want you to sit with that number for a second, because I think it says something none of us like to admit out loud. We will find time to hold everyone else’s world together. We will show up for the emergency, the deadline, the friend in crisis, the family that needs managing. We are extraordinary at nurturing everything that isn’t us. But ask a woman to protect ninety minutes, twice a month, for her own becoming & suddenly the calendar is “just too full”.

Let me offer you a different perspective, maybe it isn’t too full, maybe we were never taught that we were allowed to be on it???

So, do you struggle with this? With self-love, with actually taking care of yourself, not the performance of it, but the real, unglamorous practice of it? If you’re nodding, you’re exactly who this is for!!

Why we’re building this

and I didn’t want to build another program that asks you to optimise, achieve, or heal faster (insert massive eyeroll here!!). We wanted to build a room, here’s how she puts it and I love her for it:

“Sister Sanctuary is a gathering space for the maiden, the mother, and the crone. A place for women to gather across generations and time zones, united by the rhythms of the moon, to honor and share feminine wisdom at every stage of life. In a world that demands so much from us, authentic connection and community is not a luxury, it’s essential.”

And here is my ethos for our Sister Sanctuary:

“We are creating a space where women can come as they are, for genuine connection and support: to experience the magic of meeting with the rhythm of the moon as a gentle invitation to pause, reflect, connect and begin again.”

What is important for us, is that during the gatherings were won’t be any hierarchy, no one at the front of the room who has it more figured out than you. and I are not holding this space from above you, we’re in the circle with you, doing our own devotion work in real time, we’re together in this…

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Why the moon, specifically

Because the moon doesn’t ask you to be productive!!! It waxes, it wanes, it disappears completely and comes back anyway. It’s the oldest permission slip there is, proof that a cycle of rest, retreat and re-emergence is the system.

Twice a month, we meet inside that rhythm instead of against it & because we know sisters across the world are not in the same time zone, we’ll be adjusting the hour of each gathering so that women across the world can actually be in the room, not just the ones who happen to share our clock.

What a gathering actually looks like

Our first circle is on September 10th, the new moon in Virgo.

Virgo energy is grounded/ practical/ refining, it’s the moon of tending: routines, rituals, the small devotions that actually hold a life together. So our first gathering will move through:

• Movement - a gentle, feminine flow. Sacred goddess movement, a way back into the body before we ask anything of the mind

• Education - we’ll talk about devotion. What it actually means to be devoted to your inner wild woman, your inner maiden, your inner crone and which goddess you might call in right now, based on what this season of your life is actually asking for

• Ritual - we’ll speak about how to create & tend a small sacred altar space in your home, that quietly reminds you to come back to yourself between moons

• Book Club - One book a month, announced as we go, read together across the same rhythm

The practical part

• Drop-in: $22 (roughly £16) per session

• Three-month commitment: $122 (roughly £86), so you save $10 and more importantly, you’ve already decided you’re coming back, that’s us hoping you’ll let yourself have this more than once!!

Join us

and I are going live on Substack Thursday, August 27th at 6pm UK time/ 12noon Panama time to talk through everything Sister Sanctuary actually is, answer your questions and hold space for anyone still deciding if this is for them.

Join us live here → HEEEEREEEEE

And if you already know, if reading this made something in you exhale, you can join the circle now, here:

JOIN SISTER SANCTUARY

Three hours a month, that’s the ask… You have been giving away so much more than that, for so much longer, to everyone but yourself… Come as you are, the moon will meet you there…

With love,

Agne & Amy

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• What the Dark Feminine actually is, beyond seduction, manipulation and the idea that “dark = bad”

• The Wild Feminine and what it means to reclaim your untamed, liberated self

• How wildness and darkness intertwine through rage, instinct, boundaries, shedding and transformation

• How patriarchy has demonised women’s anger, power, sexuality and darkness and why reclaiming these parts matters!!!

• Learning to question your conditioning, discover what you actually want and stop “shoulding” on yourself

• The importance of being willing to be misunderstood by friends, family and society as you become more authentically yourself

• Why there is no one way to embody the Wild or Dark Feminine, your expression of it will be completely unique to you

• How our cycles and the changing seasons mirror periods of descent, shedding, rebirth and liberation

• Practical ways to begin exploring your wildness, including following your curiosity, finding new passions and connecting with people who make you feel less alone

• What it means to be highly sensitive and the different ways sensitivity can show up

• Coming back into the body and how horses can help highly sensitive people regulate and ground their energy

• Feeling everything from overwhelm and anxiety to immense joy, beauty and awe

• Self-worth and validation and why highly sensitive people can struggle with looking outside themselves for reassurance

• Boundaries: learning to distinguish between your emotions and the emotions you pick up from others

• Emotional expression: moving emotions through the body instead of suppressing or stuffing them down

• Slowing down creating more space in your life when the world feels too loud, fast or overwhelming

• Nature and sensory grounding: simple ways to return to the present moment

• Joy, passion and pleasure: allowing yourself to fully experience the things that light you up

• Movement and the sacral energy using dance, creativity and desire to move stagnant energy

• Childhood conditioning: how we are often taught to suppress our emotions, sensitivity and intuition

• Sensitivity as a strength: learning to work with your sensitivity rather than seeing it as something that needs to be fixed

• Emotional boundaries understanding “this is mine, and this is yours”

• Embodied leadership: becoming grounded enough to lead yourself rather than constantly reacting to the world around you

Get Thirza’s book here: Amazon USA | Amazon UK
Get The Wild Medeina’s book here: Amazon USA | Amazon UK

So here we are. is writing about the Celtic goddesses who call to her blood and her land. I’m writing about the Lithuanian goddesses who call to mine... Two stories with the same aim, to write about the reclaiming of the wild feminine through the goddesses our great-great-grandmothers may have once whispered to in the forest, or knelt for in the fields… This is my half of that thread, read ’s article HERE

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On Reclaiming Ancestry

Once I started discovering the world of the divine feminine and goddess work, my mind naturally went first to the Greek and Egyptian deities, they're often the most visible starting point, the names most people come across first (that's not a good/bad thing, just where the collective gaze tends to land). But when I was searching for the name for my own wild feminine empowerment brand, something in me wanted to look closer to home (also a big thanks goes to , during my coaching with her on my human design for business, she suggested for me to explore the LT mythology side, so thank youuuu Becky!!). So I started diving into my own ancestry instead, toward the forests my ancestors actually walked, toward the goddesses who were prayed to in my language, on my soil, by women who share my blood…

Reclaiming ancestry, for me, is about remembering & honouring that you come from somewhere specific, and that somewhere had its own gods/ goddesses, its own rituals, its own way of relating to the wild… For me, that remembering keeps circling back to two goddesses in particular: Medeina, the forest huntress and Žemyna, the earth mother. One taught me how to run wild, the other is teaching me how to stay rooted while I do it…

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Medeina: The She-Wolf of the Forest

Medeina (also called Medeinė) is the Lithuanian goddess of forests, wild animals and the hunt. Her name comes from the old Lithuanian words medis (”tree”) or medė (”forest”, this word is not used anymore btw), so Medeina: she is, quite literally, the spirit of the woods themselves. She was worshipped by hunters (our one and only King Mindaugas of Lithuania was known to worship Medeina!!) and foragers, though her loyalty was never actually to the hunters. Her job was to protect the forest and its creatures, sometimes by leading hunters astray entirely if she felt the woods were being disrespected.

Her sacred animals: bears, hares & wolves. She was known as vilkmergė - “she-wolf” and was said to move through the forest surrounded by a pack of wolves. Her earliest depictions show her not as a woman, but as a bear, which places her among the oldest layers of Baltic culture & mythology. Later she became more human, described as a young, unmarried, voluptuous huntress who had no interest in being tamed by marriage.

What she represents: sovereignty, wildness, the refusal to be domesticated, fierce protection of what’s sacred and a kind of feminine power that answers to no one!! Various researchers have drawn parallels between her and Artemis or Diana, the virgin huntress archetype who belongs to herself first!!

Her message, as I understand it: You do not need permission to be untamed. Your wildness is not something to apologise for, it is something to protect, the way she protects her forest…

My relationship with Medeina

Medeina is the reason “The Wild Medeina” exists!! When I built this brand around empowering women to reclaim their wildness, it was her energy I was channeling, even before I fully understood the mythology behind her. The she-wolf who runs with her pack but bows to no hunter… The woman who is voluptuous and beautiful annnnddd utterly unbothered by whether she’s chosen or claimed.. That’s the energy I want every woman who comes into my work to remember she already carries!!

When I feel myself shrinking: softening my voice, apologising for taking up space or editing myself to be more palatable, I think of Medeina. I think of her moving through the forest with her wolf pack, unbothered by whether anyone approves of her company. I think of her refusing marriage, refusing to be claimed or contained by anyone else's terms. She can be soft when she chooses to be and fierce the second she needs to be…. That's the version of myself I try to come back to!!

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Žemyna: The Mother of the Fertile Earth

Where Medeina is forest and motion, Žemyna is soil and stillness. She is the Lithuanian goddess of the earth, harvest, fertility & death. Her name comes from Lithuanian word “žemė”, simply meaning “earth”. She was one of the most beloved and central deities in the old Baltic pantheon, often paired with Perkūnas, the thunder god, in a classic sky-and-earth, father-and-mother pairing sort of way.

Žemyna as a goddess was woven into daily life. People kissed the ground each morning before work and each night before bed. Libations of beer were poured onto the soil at every major celebration, with the whole household taking turns to give thanks. Offerings of bread and meat were left for her at funerals, because it was believed that everything born of the earth eventually returns to her… death was never an ending, but just a different threshold to cross (I also want to add that these old pagan traditions varied from region to region, personally, where I grew up, I heard and witnessed these practices very often!).

Her sacred domain: the fertile field, the earth, the ground. Žemyna’s power lives in the soil, crops and season cycles rather than a single creature. Her presence is closer to a felt sense of the ground itself rather than a specific figure or animal (some literature still argues about what/how she actually looked like!)

What she represents: nourishment, groundedness, the sacredness of the ordinary and the ethos that life and death are not opposites, but one continuous cycle.

Her message, as I understand it: You are allowed to slow down. You are allowed to be held & not everything sacred has to roar, some of it simply has to root…

My relationship to Žemyna

I am a fire sign through and through and on top of that, I’m a Manifesting Generator in Human Design, so I am always chasing the next spark, the next idea, the next thing I feel called to build. It’s a beautiful energy (if I say so myself hehe), but left ungrounded, it burns through itself, so it needs somewhere to land, to ground…

That’s what Žemyna is teaching me. She’s the counterweight to Medeina’s wildness, a root system as I would like to call it. When Medeina says run, Žemyna says and then come back to the ground so you don’t burn out entirely… I’ve been leaning into her more this year, especially when my ideas start moving faster than my body can keep up with. She reminds me that grounded doesn’t mean stagnant, the most fertile fields aren’t the ones that are constantly being torn up, they’re the ones given time to rest between harvests…

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A Simple Ritual to Connect With Medeina & Žemyna

You’ll want a small handful of flour (or any other seeds/ oats / items that for you would resemble goddess Žemyna) & if you can, a short walk into the forest or nature-dense park.

1. Gather your offering. Take a small handful of flour/oats/ seeds with you. This stands in for the old practice of pouring beer or leaving grain for Žemyna, giving thanks to the earth by feeding it something.

2. Walk before you sit. If you can, take a short walk outside first. As you walk, let your eyes look for something the forest or earth offers you: a fallen twig, a stone, a leaf, a feather… Pick it up only if it feels offered (you will feel the gut feeling!), this becomes your Medeina object, something wild that chose you.

3. Kneel and give to Žemyna. Find a patch of earth, kneel and press your palms into the ground. Scatter your flour (or other items) onto the soil and say: “Žemyna, I give this back to you, please root me, let me be held.” See if you can feel your body’s weight sink downward as you say it, mother earth is listening to your prayers.

4. Hold your Medeina object and call the wild in. Pick up the twig/ stone/ feather you found and hold it against your chest & say: “Medeina, wolf-woman of the forest, I carry a piece of your wild with me. Let me remember, that I answer to no one but myself.” Let your body move if it wants to: shake out your hands, roll your shoulders, let a low growl or exhale out… This is where the wild gets to leave your body instead of staying trapped in it…

5. Sit in the in-between. Palms still touching the earth & object still in hand, stay in this moment as long as you need.

6. Close it. Thank the universe, nature & your guides. Keep the object somewhere you'll see it: a windowsill, your altar, your bag as a small anchor back into this feeling.

Journaling Prompts

For Medeina (the wild one):

• Where in my life am I currently shrinking myself to be more easily “caught”?

• If I trusted my wildness the way Medeina trusts the forest, what would I stop apologising for?

• What does my own “pack” look like right now, who runs alongside me?

For Žemyna (the rooted one):

• Where am I burning through myself without giving anything time to rest and regenerate?

• What would it feel like to be held by something, rather than constantly holding everything myself?

• What in my life is ready to be released back into the earth: an old identity/ a habit / a belief so something new can grow from it?

For both, together:

• Where in my body do I feel wild & where do I feel rooted and can both live there at once?

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If This Stirred Something in You...

that pull you felt reading about Medeina and Žemyna, that quiet (or not so quiet..): oh, I remember her… isn’t a coincidence!! It’s a beautiful thing called synchronicity!!

Let me tell you more about Colour Her Wild!!!

It’s six weeks of remembering who you were before the world taught you to shrink, perform and apologise for your own wildness. Co-created with , Colour Her Wild is a guided return, back to the parts of you that already know how to run wild and stay rooted, back to the woman underneath the conditioning, the roles, the noise…

If Medeina’s refusal to be tamed or Žemyna’s permission to rest and be held spoke to something in you, that’s not an accident either!!! This work is built for exactly that kind of remembering…

→ Colour Her Wild DOORS ARE OPEN

Come remember who you were before the world told you who to be!!! WE START SEPTEMBER 5TH, only 8 spots available!

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