Welcome to my newsletter where we celebrate the healing wisdom of the heart.
My wish here is to mystify much of the fear around trusting ourselves as women - and how when we do so, we mirror the okayness of doing so to our children. This we raise children knowing themselves to be the channels and healers we all are.
1-2 posts are released each week.
I share stories from my own ‘journey of the heart’ and what healing/blocks/fears has looked like for me, so that in part you can see, okay here is this woman Laura, and she’s trusting herself, and the sky hasn’t fallen on her head, maybe I can trust myself too…
When you subscribe you’ll also receive updates on the best resources, from awesome books lists, to Platforms, People, Practices & Places that may also be able to support your own heart journey.
For just as us women used to sit around with one another close, so that we could see the lines upon our faces, the crinkle of our hair; knowing them for signs of life and therefore health, and share knowledge of the berries that healed, the tonics that cured & the wild, rebellious fun that’s to be had when we stop caring so much about what others think & instead, dare to live from the greatest authority there is for a woman: the credo of her very own heart.
And because we live in changed times, where you and I are no longer always able to sit beside one another, around the fire, and way too many of us are instead tending to lone fires with just us and our children, my newsletter is here to offer you kin, reminding you of all of who you are, so that you can slip free from the strait-jacket called self doubt and once again, embrace the confidence and faith to trust yourself - and so discover yourself once again, back in the slipstream of your life. And the magic that is motherhood and living from the truth of our hearts.
And thus, mirroring to our children, hey honey, there’s a superpower in you called the wisdom of your heart & mama’s going to show you how to use it.
You can subscribe here:
Who am I?
Me…Laura: a writer, and a mother. I geek out on vitamins & history! I also adore improv and in a parallel life can be found on TikTok doing silly spoofs.
Pls note: I’m not a coach, nor an A.I. widget. There’s no online course to sell, nor coaching sessions to promote.
Instead, just as the stories of women who dared to trust themselves so that they could live the lives they wanted to live, have inspired me to trust myself more, I write because of a deep faith in the alchemy that happens when a woman reads the words of another women giving herself permission to live from her heart, and so more easily finds her courage to do so too.
Something healing happens for me in this writing. Because when a woman hears of another going through same struggles we feel less alone, and return to our inner sense of a situation and can then more confidently act. If you check out the testimonials below, you may intuit a sense of this for other readers. This is sisterhood in writerly form. or as I prefer it to call it: witch to witch!
Here I am, in my native home: the woods. As created by the very talented Daria Jabenko. And tho I can’t promise that you won’t necessarily be heading out naked when you start trusting yourself more, for sure what I can guarantee is that the more you trust yourself, the freer you will feel.
What’s in the newsletter:
A mish mash of the personal and the collective, the macro explored via the micro;
We look at what’s happening in politics, & the headlines, to better ascertain our own sense of situations with the intention to make better decisions and be less pushed around by ours, and other people’s fears;
Expect historical, philosophical and social references;
Warning: Whilst I DO believe there is a Buddha in everyone, I also believe we each carry the potential for the exact opposite. Like that story about the two wolves, it just ends up depending on which one we rest our attention on;
Inner work is the realm I hang out in. Inner work = outer healing. That’s a formula I live by.
- My Story -
In 2018, I was living a life that I was miserable in. I felt incredibly lonely, powerless and most of all crippled by the intense pain of knowing that who I was becoming and the life my family and I were living, was one that didn’t reflect either my true nature, nor my heart values.
Depressed, disconnected and in eternal brain fog, I had chronic insomnia that kept me up all night, acute back pain that rendered me lifeless on the kitchen floor. 48-hour-long asthma attacks that brought ambulances to my front door, and because I was in such a state of fawn & flight all day, coupled with serious shame about what my life was like, I was unable to connect to any of the other mothers around me.
Yet despite the fact that my heart was hollering to me at night about the changes I needed to make, my self doubt was so entrenched, my people pleasing so desperate, that I kept on refusing to honour and act on all that was asking to be lived.
Why?
Because I was scared of hurting my children
Because I was scared of being judged, of being cast out, of everyone being right, and ultimately, probably too, just not having yet reached a true Ground Zero.
In the words of a therapist, I was treading water; in my own, I was beginning to sink.
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And then I got my wake up call. My beloved dog Bongo died from a brain tumour.
The manner of his death (I had known something was up, but was so busy managing the various crises and challenges of our lives that I didn’t act soon enough), was something I chose to view as a very real lesson that my neglect and abandonment of what I knew to be true had real implications and impacts on the people and beings I loved the most. And that maybe, just maybe my sense of what my children and I needed was actually to be trusted.
And so, in a manner I can only describe as similar to turning the Titanic around, just before it hit the iceberg, I began to turn the sinking ship of my life around, and instead of making false promises to myself, to act on what I knew to be true. And ever since, my life and my children’s lives, has kept on transforming. And tho my self-doubt is something I’m still in healing with, never will I doubt again the impulse in my heart to direct me towards healing. For this I know deep in my bones: that there’s no greater authority on which direction we need to go, and how best we can navigate our challenges, then the intelligence that is our heart.
early life:
The first 7 years of my life I grew up with exceptional material, educational and geographical privileges.
I lived on Neville St, in London’s South Kensington. My first school we had to courtesy when you arrived, in the winter we wore double-breasted coats with blue velvet collars and in the summer, white gloves.
My family had a house in the country, in west Sussex atop the South Downs. My father would change his cars on what seemed a monthly basis. He drove my brother and I in a red tractor to our local pub The Barley Mow on weekends for lunch. I always had the same: a ploughman’s. A stack of white bread, cheddar cheese, pickle and cress. I ignored the pickle.
I loved my father with all my heart and he died when I was 7 years old.
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During the first 7 years of my life, I experienced acute attachment trauma - in that there really was not one adult with whom I had any sense of attachment, anxious or otherwise.
What this meant was that before I was ready to do the deep healing and met the professional’s who would come to guide me to be with the intense pain that lived in me ever since I was young, aged 10, I came to discover alcohol & all its illusory super powers: for finally I was no longer ‘painfully shy,’ but instead, able to speak freely without any fear of fall out.
What followed was a fair number of years of drinking to black out and ending my evenings, throwing up. On picnics with school friends, I was the girl other people’s parents were pulling out of the car, to vomit on the side of the road. Family Christmas gatherings, I was the girl standing on the table blind drunk. In fact, I spent a lot of my life from 10-18 vomiting from alcohol.
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However, one of the blessings of my life was that my mother practiced yoga when I was a child and also family and friends meditated. So it was there, in the environment I grew up in.
I started practicing yoga when I was 11 years old. At first, for my asthma which had started after my father died - which I’d practice on my bunk-bed at boarding school.
Then, aged 16, I started attending classes at The Life Centre in London’s Notting Hill.
Then in 2001, when I was 18, I went to Ibiza to attend one of Godfrey Devereux’s Windfire camps for a week. It was there that I found out about compost loos, sleeping in tipis, fasting, eating in silence, and being topless at the beach.
Meanwhile, in a parallel life, around the age of 15, I started experimenting with drugs like ecstasy and cocaine, alongside binge-drinking whenever I could.
Then one day, walking in Battersea Park, I realised that the high I got from the drugs was nothing compared to the high that I got from yoga, and so I quit the drugs, aged around 19, or 20.
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And though I would still drink to black out and memory loss about 3 to 4 times a year, slowly, the drinking to oblivion began to trickle away… And then when I was about 25, during a period where I attended 2x weekly Jungian sessions to look at my dreams, I got into 5 rhythms dancing: finally, I’d found my cure to the part of me seeking release from the dark and all my self-loathing. For in dancing, I could gain access to the wildness I loved in getting blind drunk, and also get very very close to what alcohol gave me, and what a friend said he most missed when he got sober: oblivion.
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After studying history at Trinity College, Dublin and then moving to Goldsmiths London to read English and history (which I thought was a waste of a degree at the time, but I suppose I should warn you that be a love of history really does seep into my newsletter!!), my 20’s were an extraordinary time of experiencing tremendous freedom. I lived in an apartment on Ladbroke Grove where I conjured up various ‘social impact’ events, most of which were co-created with friends.
One of these events happened after visiting Rwanda in 2004. Alongside a friend, we created The Why Not Event? raising money for orphans of the Rwandan genocide. We had Jude Law the actor present it, and formed a partnership with a Rwandan charity, led by a Rwandan team for where the money would go, but even though it was a glossy event and a really fun party, afterwards, I asked myself: did we really make any change?
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After that event, I was asked to go on the committee for Human Rights Watch film festival, (I was a part of a small band of Londoners who formed their Human Rights Watch London Network for younger supporters of the organisation), and at the opening night for the main film being celebrated that year, I met the late Michael Young who the film that year was based on, and he said okay yes, when I asked if I could take him out for lunch to learn about his work. From him, I got an insight into a truly tremendous example of a human being effecting extraordinary change, and yet no one knew his name…
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My 20’s:
And then after that, another friend and I set up Wonderful Women & Marvellous Men events, and then my own business, Bonding For Good, and then London for London with another friend where on on a night in October 2009 we worked with 750 bars, clubs and pubs to raise money for young people whose lives had been affected by violence in the capital.
The event secured around £1.5m worth of media value, from promotional partners that included Capital FM, London Tonight and GMTV. And backed by everyone from the then popular Major, Boris Johnson, and also Prince William.
That event was a gift in many ways, but in one key way: to have had this experience where something you’ve played a part in creating becomes bigger then you.
For me, this was the moment I realised that the campaign had truly become London’s: when our media partners helped us launch a t-shirt competition to design the t-shirt that our volunteers would wear on the night of the event. And as I read the double page spread about the campaign, I realised: wow, people have their own relationship to the campaign that has nothing to do with us, the founders. And that was a really cool moment.
It’s an experience so similar to being a mother. That point when your kids are going out in the world and having relationships with people that are uniquely their own, and you realise, that people are forming their own relationships to your children. And it’s kind of really special, to realise you are NOT the centre of the world To realise you can play a part in creating something, someone, but really, that’s not all of it.
Another key experience in my 20’s, was a pilot project I launched for a UK based foundation, in Cambodia.
I had got the job suggesting the type of project I’d launch and I went out to Cambodia with IDEAS and then in having ideas, LIFE happened: I was sitting there in the car waiting to have an appointment with someone who was important because part of my job was that I had lots of money to invest in this project from the company I was working for, and then there I am and Nharn, my Cambodian friend who’s making all of these introductions for me, is sitting beside me in the car, and he asks what book I’m reading. I show him. It’s talking about eco villages, and Nharn says well actually we’re working with Max Lindegger who set up an eco-village in Australia which won a UN award and are you interested doing something similar here? And in that moment, my body said YES and we cancel all the meetings we had planned for that day, and instead go in a completely different direction.
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Another experience that’s shaped me, is Vipassana. I’ve sat on a couple of retreats and served on 2 retreats and for a few days when I was in Cambodia as well. And even tho, we were meant to be in silence, I still remember the feeling in my body of the way we worked together in the kitchen. Silent yes, but in communication with each other: very much so.
Above, is a photo of me when I shaved my hair off.
Something my heart asked me to do, and I’ve always wanted to, but was too scared. Then in 2018, when I committed to trusting my heart for 100% life guidance, whether my heart asked me for small things - take motorbike lessons - or large things - move to Brighton - I trusted it, and did so…
…and every time I did, immense healing would happen. As if each thing my heart was asking of me, was another chance at learning a crucial lesson that perhaps some get to learn in childhood, but had passed me by.
So, with shaving my hair, (it’s now returning to its former length), I got to find out that who we are is something freer and more okay then I’d previously felt to be. It was also so liberating as a woman… to not give a damn. To feel that deep sense of freedom. As well as being immensely cathartic and symbolic. To have cut away all that had been dead weight in my life, to feel a physical sense of lightness, of peace…
My kitchen table where I do a lot of my writing. Here’s my daughter Eve. The quote on the wall is from Carlos Castaneda: “Intent is a force that exists in the universe and when a Sorcerer (those that live of the Source) beckon intent, it comes to them and sets up the path for attainment, which means that Sorcerer’s always accomplish what they set out to do.”
This is our sitting room in our Tatamala: houses that dream so that people can dream. And my 2 children, Eve and Jack, and one of our dogs: Tara.
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What my children think of posing for a photo with me.
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Also, PS: I’m deaf and wear hearing aids in both ears. But that’s another story. And one you can read more about in my first book if you’d like to: Travels With My Daughter: An Experience of Motherhood which is available on Amazon, and you can get your copy here. I am currently finishing my next book, The Next Right Step: a historical fantasy set in Brighton during WW1. About an Irish traveller, Shelta Appleby who befriends a local girl, Emily Parker. It’s about the healing & gently rebellious nature of female friendships & the magic that unfolds when we restore our faith in our inner knowing…
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My intention:
Teaching my son Jack some dance moves.
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If I’m driven by a wish for how I live, it’s that my children - and actually I include my dogs here too - that they have this sense that mum, she really wanted us to be our own people.
Trust yourself, she’d always say. Trust yourself - even if what your self, your heart, body and intuition - are telling you goes against me, trust yourself.
And in my writing: I hope this is true for you too.
That anything you read, you go away thinking, trust myself… trust myself… god, yes, maybe I can trust myself. And this becomes a new mantra, like a beat and a rhythm that sets itself up in your heart.
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Eve and I above: my family below.
What others have to say about this newsletter:
“Thank you so much for writing your newsletter…I wanted to try and convey how much I relate to what you’re writing about in the newsletters.” Alex MH.
“Laura’s willingness to keep an open heart has…inspired me to be more full in the expression of my heart, in ways she probably doesn’t even know! Whenever we share our writing or our song, our dance or art, whenever we honour the creative fire that is, always burning within, it will leave a mark for people to follow; for their hearts in turn to recognise.” Charlotte H.
“I want to tattoo these anecdotes all over me!! All the blocks are familiar and I know them only too well but the anecdotes are fresh and new and heart led and I LOVE them. I will be practicing them all. So thank you sister.” Chessy T-W.
“Your newsletter cracked me wide open… so deeply mirrors the threads in my life that are pulling me this way and that, and is such a contagious beacon of light to that part of me that knows…” Eliza P.
“It's quite rare that I come across writing that has a particular resonance that pulls me in… So far whatever I have read from you has had that effect.” Elspeth D.
“Simply beautiful!” Julia M.
“I don’t know what it is, but you’re writing so corresponds with recent episodes or experiences I’m going through. I really look forward to your writing Laura… I never feel quite so alone in my feelings after reading one of your emails. Thank you.” Natasha D.
“A wonderful accompaniment to my morning & I liked your ‘P.S’ format at the end of the newsletter. Somehow made it humble as opposed to advisory!” Skye G.
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