The last time I saw my father alive, was on Easter in 2007. My best friend Matt, who didn’t know he was a death doula yet, we were just kids really, convinced me to just stop by and see him, even though I was reluctant.
I am here in Paris, on a journey of exploration… a new birth this month for my 43rd solar return, and the 18th anniversary of my father’s death. We speak of listening while speaking, moving while sharing—this is the embodiment of the feminine mystery. Not linear, but spiral. Not fixed, but flowing. It’s how the Oracle speaks-to those sensitive enough to listen. It’s how dancers pray. It’s how healers channel.
I am bleeding as I approach my ancestral lands—this is initiation. The veil is thin. Blood is not just biology; it is lineage, it is offering, it is story. My body is remembering a myth…
Let your myth come as you listen to this episode. Let it rise from the soil of your grandmother’s land, carried on the winds of old songs and unnamed prayers. I’m enjoying time with my lover right now, and then I’ll be traveling with a group of women in the South of France listening deeply in silence, and in expression, exploring deep questions:
What is sacred marriage?
What does it mean to feel and know God within?
What does Mary Magdalene want us to create together for this world, now?
Have a listen to the channeled Mother of the Sword podcast message above—about what to do with the birth that’s wanting to come through us, even in the midst of conflict, unknown, rebirth, conflict, and yes, even death. About how much our relationships suffer when we choose not to unhook ourselves from the systems and the past that keep us bound and learn the relational skills necessary for liberation.
This is the Magdalene path: no more explaining, no more placing our safety in others—but instead, becoming liberated in our service, in our inner knowing, and in the fierce listening it takes to truly follow. With the skills to relate, imperfectly and honestly.
You bleed, you descend, you listen, you rise. The sacred marriage is in that movement. The Magdalene path honors both the descent and the resurrection.
When you walk with or as Magdalene, you are touching the archetypal—beyond personal story, into deep collective memory.
What does it mean to listen while speaking?
To be moved while sharing? To die to the ego,
in service to all the soul still has left to share?
I’m heading this week to the land of my father’s grandmother, Rosa, in Calabria—then to Mary Magdalene cave.. Have a listen to the episode to learn more about the bloody devotional very raw and real rituals practiced there since pre-Christian times. (I am also currently bleeding.)
Marion Woodman spoke of “the basement man.”
The one who would rather die than admit he needs help or express, anything authentic and honest. The one who has no real relationship to power within.
We all have one inside wanting integration. Wanting to be a part of the death and rebirth dance. The father. The sun. The addiction. The death. The grief. The letting go. The lack of connection. The magic of union. Come with me on a journey through my body
–a memory, a myth, that needs to breathe.
It lived in my body, one that needed to be shared. PS. We’ll be sharing a three day online event Body Temple Dance challenge exploring Goddess, Sex and the Body in May, after our little break here on pilgrimage, stay tuned. Reach out via email to inquire about 1:1 relational coaching solo and couples, Sacred Inner Marriage retreat in New Mexico in June, and for our upcoming business and pleasure program called Dark Goddess Doula and someone from our team will get back to you!
Scene: I am 23 years old, visiting my father in New Jersey, not yet realizing he had already begun to give up on his life. The air that summer was heavy with humidity and something else I couldn’t name then—a kind of stillness that had settled into his apartment where he had just moved, out of my childhood home after my mother left him. He moves slower than he used too, spoke less, sleeps sitting up in a chair, cigarette always burning between his brain fingers.
I bring groceries. Clean up. I asked how he was doing and accepted his vague answers, too afraid to press further. I hadn’t yet learned how to name what I felt beneath words yet, or how to recognize the quiet language of heartbreak.
Looking back now, I wonder if some part of me did know—but chose not to know. Grief often arrives long before death does. It seeps into the space between conversations, into our dreams.
That visit marked a beginning I didn’t see coming. A slow unraveling. A descent into the underworld. My father’s… and mine.
I take out my hair kit, scissors, and a comb from a leather case. There's a mirror across from where my father, Pete sits, and he gives himself a quick glance.
As I begin to comb his hair, I can't help but feel connected to him. Beyond what we're saying or not saying, we're together in a way that brings me joy, even if I can't quite feel it. Pete moved here with a broken heart.
After I moved out of my childhood home and into my boyfriend Shawn Dyckman’s big Irish family house, about 30 minutes away, I eventually convinced my mom to leave.
He had been abusive toward her in ways he wasn’t with me. My mom Barb is an undiagnosed co-dependent living with my father, an addict for 30 years. She’s also an adult child of severe sexual and physical abuse from her father. Ironically, Barb would volunteer with domestic violence victims in our town.
Pete then began dating strippers with drug habits similar to his own. Slowly but steadily, he gave up on his life—no more perfect lawn for the mailman to disobediently walk on, no more big driveway to hose down, or pool to clean.
“When are you going to get a bed? You can’t just sleep in the chair; it's really not good for you,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m going to get one this week,” he mutters. “I’ve just been working my ass off and having a hard time with money.”
With each lift and tug of his black-and-white peppered hair, I feel myself getting closer and farther away all at once.
I brush his soft temples with my hands. To have him close to my heart, part of me wishes I could just hold him and tell him everything will be okay. But I’m having trouble catching my breath.
I leave my body a little more with each snip of his slicked-back hair.
Inhale, exhale. Scissors over comb to trim the sideburns and hairline, so he won’t need another cut for a while.
“Your mother never loved me,” he whimpers. “I gave her everything.”
I’ve been practicing yoga now, in between the cocaine-filled nights and the weed-smoke-filled days, and I really feel like I’m starting to figure this life thing out.
“Dad, why don’t you tell me a few things you’re grateful for right now? Maybe that will help you feel better.” Pete just looks at me like I’m crazy.
There isn’t much else to do in this moment except give what I have—everything—because Pete gave it all away. His hair was mine to cut in that apartment he slowly let go of his life in. His hair was mine to cut.
Here I am, and I’ve found myself landed in a body, with a purpose in the pain, carrying an undeniable passion, with an acceptance of what is unacceptable, held by an inexplicable grace.
Grief is my teacher. Creativity takes courage. To change at all, to grow and evolve—even in the most positive of ways—takes us out of the seat of control. It’s an admission, in a way, that if we want to live an authentic life, we have to submit to Spirit’s wild ways of working through us.
Loss, in itself, is a mirror, looking into the depths of all that we are and all that we wish we could be—or had been. It forces us to leave behind dreams and desires, questions that may never find their rightful answers, throats closed and clogged for years.
The fear of loss limits our ability to live. We spend our days now, welcoming the different parts of us into the same room—slowly, gently, but with the tenacity to keep going, no matter how many times we fail.
We will learn to love again. Even if it kills us.
Because somewhere between the silence of that apartment and the ache I carried out the door, I understood: love isn't always soft. Sometimes it's a reckoning. A resurrection. A refusal to let the heart close completely, even after it's been shattered by absence, by disappointment, by watching someone you love disappear while still breathing.
We will love again—not the way we did before, not blindly, not out of need or habit—but with eyes open. With hearts that remember how much was lost when we turned away from ourselves, from each other.
Even if it kills us… maybe that’s the point. A kind of ego death. A breaking open.
The Magdalene path. Love as initiation.
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