20: The real pilgrimage begins when you come home

In this episode I share about my priestess pilgrimage to Glastonbury, England (AKA Avalon), and the experiences that shifted something deep within me.

It’s a story about remembering the soul's purpose; not a travel "must do" list.

EXPLORE:

• Why Glastonbury has been connected to Avalon, sacred pilgrimage, Arthurian legend, and spiritual traditions for centuries
• My experience traveling with 33 women through the Rosa Mystica Scent Priestess work
• The moment I realized I may not be leaving womb and birth work behind, but expanding what birth means
• What it felt like to give and receive sacred anointing in a room filled with women tending to other women
• The unexpected healing that surfaced through my paternal/masculine lineage
• What I learned about being a mother, wife, woman, and priestess without compartmentalizing those identities
• Calling in the Noble Masculine, and why feminine reclamation cannot be the end of the conversation
• My experiences at the White Spring, Avebury, West Kennet Long Barrow, Chalice Well, and Glastonbury Tor
• The unexpected man I anointed at the Tor and the email he later sent that confirmed something I had been questioning within myself
• Why spiritual experiences mean very little if we cannot bring them home into our relationships, parenting, work, bodies, and ordinary weekday mornings

Pilgrimage isn’t just about going somewhere sacred.

It’s about remembering something while you’re there — and then having the courage to live it when you come home.

RESOURCES IN EPISODE

5: What I return to, to hold my frequency

Song: Savage Daughter by Ekaterina Shelehova

Book: The Girl Who Baptized Herself by Meggan Watterson

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:33

Hello and welcome back to this podcast. Thank you for joining me after an extended pause that I had. And I'm back. And I don't know when the next episode will be after this, but we're gonna go. And I'm really excited about what's coming up. So before I get into this episode, I just really want to say thank you for being with me this year. It's been an evolution on so many levels. And I'm really excited to share this episode, my trip to Glastonbury, England, with you because the evolution got heightened and more clear. And yeah, I might as well just get into it. I actually have my journal sitting here with me because I want to keep it in the live moment of what I was walking through while I was in Glastonbury, England. And it's been about a month and a half. I went to Glastonbury in July, and Glastonbury is also called Avalon. And I want to tell you about truly this life-shifting experience that I had. And so, yeah, so thanks for walking with me in this. I think that you're gonna really get a visual and hopefully feel from me where I am today and maybe what's possible for you of what it's like to go to sacred lands that maybe our blood ancestors have come from or uh past lives where we have a remembrance there. And I'm gonna go into that more here today. So let me just keep focused. All right. Okay. Yeah, I really like the phrase, this has been life shifting for me, because I didn't come home thinking, wow, that was an amazing trip. I met some wonderful women. I really came home different. I could feel it in my body, in my relationships, especially with my husband, in how I was going to show up professionally and in working with women, and and maybe men too in the future. And how I was relating to my children too, uh, all of it was really deeply affected. Most notably, I came home carrying a different frequency. And before we get too far into that word, there is a previous episode, I'll link it in the show notes here about what frequency is. And, you know, I really like to stay rooted on the earth. So I love the mystical world. I can be in there all day and be nonlinear and spiral, which was the great thing about going to Avalon. But I'm also very spiritually rooted in the earthly experience. I think that all of our souls came here to receive the challenges that we are faced with. And it's really easy for me to say out loud. It actually isn't easy for me to say it out loud. I think it is the truth, and it is hard to face when you're going through a deeply challenging time. It is part of our soul's journey to get through it and to have those experiences. And so I'm just going to leave that here. Glastonbury, England has been regarded as a spiritually significant place for centuries. Pagan, Christian, Arthurian, and contemporary mystical traditions have all gathered around this landscape, this beautiful place. And Glastonbury has long been associated with Avalon, the legendary place King Arthur was taken after his final battle. And the monks of Glastonbury have claimed to have discovered his grave in 1191, and I actually got to visit that place and take a picture of his grave and be there. It was really beautiful, really beautiful sights. And there are also stories connecting the Tor, which we also visited, and I'll tell you about later here, with the Celtic otherworld and the later traditions involving Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail. So there are so many layers here in this one land, small landmark on our planet. We have Christianity, the Athurian mythology, pagan traditions, the grail, the feminine, the masculine, death, rebirth, all layered into this little place in England. And when you're there, you understand why humans have been telling stories about this land for a very, very long time. I mean, at least I did. And what I'm definitively sharing with you today is what happened inside of me while I was there. Something really happened. And I shared in a previous episode that one of my devotions this year in 2026 has been my work with Priestess Presence and the Rosa Mystica Mystery School. Rosa Mystica is the home of the sent priestess work I've been studying. It includes sacred anointing, holy oils, story, movement, art, history, embodiment, and this idea of remembrance. Not necessarily becoming someone new, it's remembering more of the essence of who you already are and bringing that more forward. Us humans have been using aromatic oils, perfumes, resins, and practicing anointing in sacred and religious ways for thousands of years. The particular lineage I use, Scent Priestess, Rosa Mystica, some of the stories and archetypes I'm learning comes through the mystery school I'm studying. And some of it belongs to mystical and oral tradition rather than archaeology can neatly prove. And even though I say that, there is a lot of archaeological evidence of scent priestses all over the earth, everywhere. And I'm really okay with it not being so definitive that there are theories, that there are evidence, and that is enough because the remembering is so real. And this speaks to a spiritual practice because no one needs archaeology to validate anyone's spiritual experience. My mentors and guides in Rosa Mystica, the Scent Priestess training, are the founders, Elaine Khalila Dowdy and Diana DuBrot. And they've been traveling to Avalon for a decade. And their work centers around bringing anointing and sacred oils into modern day life. I knew I've always wanted to visit sacred spaces where my blood ancestors have lived. And when the opportunity came up to go to Glastonbury with my with the founders of Rose the Mystica, Diana Dubro and Elaine Cleeland Doughty, I jumped on board right away. I didn't fully understand what we were going to do. I knew we were going to visit sacred sites, I knew there would be ceremony, I knew there would be oils, and I trusted the women leading it. And I most importantly, I trusted myself, and that was enough. And I was curious, would anything remember? Not intellectually, but like would my body remember? Would something subconscious, ancestral, cellular, whatever language you want to use, recognize this land? And truly, there was a remembering. The actual pilgrimage ran Friday to Friday. I arrived early and I stayed afterward. So altogether, I was gone for a full 10 days. And packing to leave was so difficult. I was resistant to this trip, especially because of where I was in my marriage. My beloved and I had been opening our hearts to one another in ways we hadn't in a very long time, and in so many ways, really ever. And I didn't want to leave. It felt like, wait, we're finally here. We're touching something, we're we're finding each other again, and now I'm going across the ocean. I was afraid it would disrupt whatever was happening between us. It actually did the opposite. I came home carrying something that I think our relationship actually needed. I had spent a week much more deeply in the nonlinear world. Ceremony, ritual, scent, touch, women, song, prayer, nature, the body. And then I came home to our wonderfully ordinary life. Children, driving, housework, meals, marriage, laundry, all of it. And instead of those worlds being separate, I started to understand that maybe my work is bringing them together. That's becoming what priestessing means to me. It isn't escaping into some mystical world. It's bringing the sacred into this one. I came home and had the privilege of anointing my beloved and sharing some of this medicine with him. And yes, anointing is physical. There are hands, oils, and scent. And underneath it is something deeply spiritual. It can say, I see you. I honor you. I will hold you as you remember. And just the other day, one of my dear friends, I was talking about sent precessing with and sharing it with her. And she's like, Yeah, she's like really in the self-discovery of the subtle things in life, how one small shift can be felt on a deep level. She looked at me and said, I think this is what you do, is the subtle things. I was like, Yeah, I think that's what it like. There's more words for it now, like that I'm getting that I'm working in the subtle realms, the subtle shifts, the subtle changes, the openings, the releasing, the putting down that is no longer needed. And it's not necessarily major life decisions, but they're small and deeply impactful. And so that was just a really marvelous and affirming experience that I had with one of my girlfriends the other day. So getting back to the story, there were 33 of us on this journey, all women. I didn't know anyone. And during one of our first circles, we pulled cards. The card I pulled was called Fire Opal Feminine. It had this upside-down triangle, which I associate with the womb, with this fiery orange glow inside of it. And immediately I knew what it meant for me. I was ready to put something down. Elaine had invited us to consider whether our cards were showing us something that needed to be released or claimed or maybe something else. What came through for me was I know enough about the womb. Not that I'm finished with womb work. I don't believe that anymore. I thought that I might be done, but I am not done. But what I was being asked was to put down the form of womb work I had known and I have been showing up as. Because for almost two decades, I've been in the pregnancy, birth, postpartum space, especially in the label as a yoga teacher. I've been supporting mothers and babies, and this has been so much of my medicine. And sitting there in Avalon, I knew there is another layer now. There's eroticism, mysticism, anointing, relationships, sacred union. Something was opening, and I said to the group out loud, I know enough. I have to put down my form of wombwork. And when I said that, there was no music playing, the room was quiet. But exactly after I finished saying work, the audio system made this sound like, ah, and everybody heard it, and we laughed because okay, message received. I put my hands up and I said, message received. And that night I wrote in my journal, this week I know I'll get insight into this next phase of my medicine. And then my children came through. I realized my daughter needs to see me enter this next phase. My son needs to see it too. They don't only need to know me as their mother, they need to see the woman their mother becomes. They need to witness their father evolve. They need to witness me evolve. I only have a few years before they're both moving into their own adult lives. And maybe one of the gifts we can give our children as they get older is letting them discover that their parents are actual human beings. That people change, marriages evolve, purpose changes, desire changes, identity changes, and two people can still look at each other and say, I want to know who you are now, not who you were when we got married, not who you were when the babies were born. Who are you now? And can I meet you there? Can we create from there? I wrote an affirmation that day. I am open to receive all that today and this week ahead will offer me to evolve, to gain clarity of my purpose, my magic, and ultimately my peace. The next day we received our temple keeper oils, and mine is Veda. And I was so grateful. I had already spent months working with the releaser of fear in my Rosa Mystica practice because I knew her. I knew the smell. I trusted the oil. I knew something about the medicine I associated with her. And this trip wasn't technically any kind of sent priestess training. It was a pilgrimage, it was an embodiment, it was a remembrance. And when the Vediver temple keepers were called forward, there were two of us, and we looked alike. Blonde hair, we both wore high ponytails and very similar red dresses. We walked forward together, and it was just kind of wild because we looked similar and yet embodied the oil differently in our own unique way. And that itself became a teaching for me. The medicine doesn't erase the woman, it moves through the woman. And then later I was paired with my soul sister for the week, the temple keeper of Pachuli, wisdom's daughter. And we began experiencing anointing together. This is where something in me really started remembering. There were women everywhere in our room. Our room was like a cave, giving, receiving, hands, oil, laughter, crying, sound, bodies, and care. Within the tradition I'm studying, we're invited into this image of temple cultures where women tended to one another with oils, touch, ritual, and beauty. And again, I don't need every detail of the image to be historically proven to tell you what it awakened in me. Because standing in this room and looking around at women caring for women, something in my body went, Oh, this is where I belong. The room was alive. There were moans, laughter, tears, release, stillness. At one point when I was receiving, I had six hands on me. Six absolutely glorious. And I remember looking around and thinking, women caring for women. That's it. There was nothing frivolous about it. It felt deeply medicinal. My Patchouli sister and I also spent time eye gazing before I anointed her. And while I was watching her, her face shifted. I saw something. I actually saw someone. I'm not going into the details here because it really belongs to her. But afterward, I told her what I saw, and she knew exactly who I was talking about. She knew the story, and something in me settled deeply because it completely affirmed what I perceive matters, what I sense matters, and what I know matters. And it's likely true. And I can actually do this. I gave her a full body anointing, and afterward, I had this incredibly simple thought. I can do this. I really, really, I can do this. And I want to do this. I want to give this. In the same circle of women, I met another woman doing very radical, womb-centered work. Her just being herself awakens something inside of me. Her willingness to be fully herself showed me where I was editing myself. And it brought me back to motherhood because I realized there are pieces of me that I want my daughter to know. And my son. Their mother is a priestess. But sometimes I enter mom and freeze there. I know how to be a mother, but how do I allow the priestess to stay in the room? How do I let the wife stay in the room? How do I be a woman, a mother, a wife, a priestess without compartmentalizing all of them? I don't have a polished answer to that yet. I'm living it right now. But Avalon made the question impossible to ignore. Before receiving my full body anointing, we would pass through ritual gates. Every day we pass through ritual gates, but I'm talking about right before when I got anointed. We were asked questions. We received blessings. And at one of those gates, the prompt was what needs to be released or healed in your lineage? I expected my maternal line to show up. I've done so much work there. But immediately my paternal line showed up. My dad, the masculine. And the message that came through was not being able to be oneself. It surprised me, and then it made perfect sense. My father wanted to be an artist, but he was told and made to believe that being an artist wasn't going to provide the life he wanted to give his future family. So he became an architect. He worked, he provided, he did what so many men of his generation were taught to do. And there wasn't much room left for the artist. And suddenly I could see this inherited belief in myself. You cannot simply be who you are. This isn't just a maternal lineage of the feminine. This is also on the paternal side for the men in my family. You have to make yourself useful. You have to prove value. You have to learn something, become qualified, work hard. Then maybe what you offer deserves investment. Maybe it deserves attention. Maybe you deserve attention. And I saw how deeply I had inherited that story. I had spent so much time tending the feminine lineage that I hadn't realized the next place calling me was my inherited masculine. The night before my anointing, my Cedar Wood sister roommate gave me Reiki. And afterward, she told me how open my heart was, how she saw fields of daisies and flowers, and she just wanted to stay there. And I felt so incredibly seen. And then she said, Our family dog Maya came through with a very important spiritual teaching. Play more. And of course, Maya would say that. Her Reiki session opened me before I went through the gates and onto the anointing table. Because when I received my anointing, I was gone. And somehow, more here than ever. Around me, women were crying, wailing, releasing anger, making sound. And there I was as Isis. And I didn't even know who Isis was, and I was her. All these images were moving through me. Were they past lives? Were they archetypes? My subconscious? The imaginal? I don't know. And I actually don't need to know because the message underneath all of it was I get to be who I am. I get to be the woman I was born to be in this lifetime. My parents compromise parts of themselves. Their parents compromise themselves. I'm sure their parents compromise themselves. And so on. Sometimes they had to, because of money, gender, culture, survival, the era they lived in. And I suddenly understood what an incredible privilege it is to live right now. I don't have to compromise quite so much of myself. I can be scared and ridiculous, fierce and loving, erotic and maternal, spiritual and earthly, playful and serious, a mother and a lover, a priestess and a woman standing at the kitchen counter making dinner. All of it. And so can my beloved. And maybe that's part of this phase of our marriage. Not asking, can we become who we used to be? But can we become more completely ourselves and remain devoted to each other while we do it? If we're willing. And when I came off that table, my body was vibrating. My arms, my hands, legs, my feet felt like they were on fire, tingling everywhere in like the best kind of way, but also uncontrollable. And I don't really have much more language for it than that. It just felt like I was fully vibrating in every cell of my body and being. And later we went into Glastonbury, this little town city, and held ceremony at the little Magdalene chapel. We sang, we took sacrament, and we called in the noble masculine. It was an amazing experience. I got to call in my father, my brother, my beloved, and my son. Men I already experienced as having nobility within them. And I called them more deeply into their creativity. I named that they weren't allowed to be who they were born to be because of circumstances and stories that they were told. And that my son, who is becoming a young man, gets to be in his creativity, gets to be in his authenticity, to be the man that our world is ready for. And he doesn't have to compromise himself. My brother, my dad, and his father get to walk with him and show him what they couldn't be. I called in their artistry, their integrity, and their fullness. And around me, women were naming the men they loved. Some were honoring men who already embodied healthy masculinity. Others were calling men upward where they had been harmed. And it moved me deeply because this wasn't women sitting around saying, men are the problem, there's too much toxic masculine going on in the world. It wasn't that cyclical cycle. It was women saying, We need you. We need the noble masculine, the protector who does not control, strength that does not dominate, structure that does not imprison. The masculine that can stand beside the feminine without needing to suppress her. And something in me new. My reclamation doesn't have to happen separately from theirs. Maybe we get to reclaim it together. The following day we entered a sacred painting experience centered around Isis. If you're unfamiliar with Isis, she is one of the great goddesses of ancient Egypt, often associated with magic, protection, motherhood, and restoration. In mythology, her husband Osiris is killed, and Isis searches for and reassembles him, eventually conceiving their son Horus. Her story became one of devotion, of grief, of tremendous magical power, and the restoration of life from what appeared to be lost. And I think you can understand why that archetype continues to speak to women. She doesn't bypass grief, she enters it. She gathers what has been torn apart. She creates from what looked finished. That speaks to me. I didn't know what ISIS looked like, the images of her or anything. And on our very last day, we got to go to a jewelry shop called Stone Age. I picked out a winged Isis for a pendant on a necklace. It just felt like, ooh, this is me. Like this is this is what I need. I didn't know who she was, but I needed her. And I wanted her in my life. And then one of the women came up to me. She's like, oh my gosh, the winged Isis, you know, and she's talking to me about it. And I'm like, oh, this is Isis. Of course. Her story deeply resonates with me. And that was part of the magic of being able to free yourself of the logical world, to just trust your knowing. And yeah, it was just so special and magical. And I loved my winged Isis. And so if you see me in person, I might be wearing it from time to time because I just love it. So, anyways, so coming back to my story. Our theme was Isis and her story. And what we did was in our activity for that time was we painted. And before painting, we danced. We danced, we moved, we had an embodied experience of being in our body and breath. We painted and we were given three colors: red, white, and gold. Red represents the feminine, white, the masculine, and then gold. And we weren't trying to paint anything, you know, quote unquote, good. We let the body paint. There was no instruction. And actually, at first, we were only given red paint. I didn't even know that we were going to get white or that we were going to get gold. So it was just, we were just painting with red. There was no judgment, there were no borders, and every single painting looked different. And of course it did. We had the same colors, same ritual, but 33 completely different women. The red and the white together created pink, union, and then gold, creation, cycles, seasons. What becomes possible through union is the gold. So then one day we went to the White Spring at the base of the Glastonbury Tor. There are actually two distinct springs very close to one another in Glastonbury. The Chouse Well is known as the Red Spring because its water is iron-rich and leaves its characteristic red-orange staining. The neighboring White Spring flows through a separate well house. We had the White Spring privately. And this place, oh my gosh, we entered it so magical. We entered this cool dark stone space lit only by candles. And I'm telling you, this would be an insurance nightmare in America. Only candles, candles, stone, water, and then a bunch of naked women. I'm just saying it was extraordinary. And so we undressed, and Elaine, our high priestess, stood in the freezing water holding a chalice with the priestesses supporting her. And one by one, we entered to make our vows and self-baptize. And I was the second woman. So I had approximately zero time to prepare myself because I was taking in the environment and in everything that we were doing and undressing in front of a bunch of other women, which I haven't done in a super long time because as a dancer, when you're backstage, you're undressing all the time, but that's totally different. This is a totally different experience. And when I entered the water, what came through was that I would no longer compromise myself, that I would remain devoted to women, to children, to family systems. But later, when I wrote about it and I was reflecting, I realized there was a deeper vow there, that I was vowing to follow my heart and stay true to my priestess path. And one by one, we witnessed each other. No clothes, no hiding, no performing, just women witnessing women make vows to their own lives. And once everybody went through, a handful of us went back into the freezing water. We stood in a circle with our arms around one another, and we sang Savage Daughter. And I'll drop that song link here into the show notes as well. If you haven't heard it yet, it's a strong one. And the version that I'm sharing is, I just resonate so much with it. And I hope that you will too. And I'm also going to drop in the show notes the book of Fecla, of Fecla and Paul. She is the girl who baptized herself, and that's what the book is called. So you can learn a little bit more about self-baptizing and this ancient scripture that has been found, but not yet adopted by most modern Christian religions yet. So those are the show notes. The next day we traveled to Aveberry and had a private guided experience with Peter Knight and his wife Sue Wallace. The whole Ave Bury landscape is extraordinary. Neolithic stone circles, avenues, burial mounds, ceremonial sites built across thousands of years. And the main stone circle at Avebury was originally made up of roughly 100 stones with avenues connecting it to other monuments in the surrounding area. One thing that fascinated me was the different shapes of the stones along West Kenneth Avenue. Some are more tall and more cylinder shaped, and others are wider and even a little bit triangular shaped. It's suggested and very easy to believe that they may have represented the male and female forms, with the tall stones representing the masculine and the broader stones representing the feminine. Again, these are from thousands of years ago. Not everything is super easy to interpret, but there are ways to connect the dots. And standing there after everything we had already experienced so far that week, masculine, feminine, masculine, feminine, masculine, feminine, again, the same conversation. And then we went inside. What I originally wrote in my journal was a cave. I guess it's not technically a cave, it's called the West Kent Longborough. And learning what it actually was makes my experience even wilder. So West Kennet is a Neolithic chambered burial mound built around 3650 BC. It stretches more than 100 meters and has five chambers opening from a central passage. The partial remains of at least 46 people have been found there. And there are big evidence and theories that this was a place of not only death of a burial site, but also of birth. This place is very, very ancient. Ancient, ancient. It is a womb and tomb. And I walked all the way into the far chamber. It was dark. We had drumming. We had one candle. And instead of being in fear, I actually felt calm and connected. I centered myself. I had a hand against one of the walls and closed my eyes and let the rhythm of the drum shift my awareness. And then suddenly, after a few minutes, the energy beside me changed, and I blinked my eyes open, and there was another woman standing next to me who hadn't been there before, and without thinking, I wrapped my arms around her. She was much taller than me. I brought her toward my shoulder, and I whispered, It's not fair, and I'm sorry. And then something took over that I know deeply birth. This woman had been going through an enormous rebirth all week. The details are hers, I won't share them here, but I knew what to do because I know laboring women. I know that place so well. I know the moment when a woman thinks she cannot. I know the sounds, I know the body, and I know when words help and when they absolutely don't. Eventually I guided her onto all fours, and I started speaking to her the way I speak to a woman in labor. More hands came, more women came, more support, until eventually she was called back into the present moment. Because practically speaking, we could not occupy a five thousand-year-old burial mound for the rest of the day. Other people were wanting to come in, although I think some of us would have gladly have stayed in there for a large portion of the day. So eventually she stood up. A couple of the other priestesses started to tend to her and take care of her. So I walked outside with two stones that she had been carrying as anchors throughout the week. I climbed the steps to go on top of the long burrow, and there I was standing directly above where we had just been, just above these ancient chambers. So below me was a place where she had just experienced this symbolic birth. Up above, it was a beautiful, bright, sunny day, open sky, fields for as far as the eyes can see, trees, land, farms. No one else was up there but me, which was also odd. Because we were all out of the we were all out of, I'm still calling it the cave. We were all out of the cave, and but nobody else was there but me up on top. I don't know what they were doing. My hands were shaking. I placed her stones in the sun, directly above where we had just been. I placed them down so that they could discharge to recharge, whatever language you want to use. And I stood there with my arms lifted up to the sky like a conduit. I felt so alive. As much as my hands were reaching to the sky, my feet were pressing to the earth. And then my knees buckled and I knelt down. I put both hands on the ground. It was grassy and gravelly, and I just wept. I released whatever was mine, I released whatever wasn't mine, and I released something I had gathered from her that wasn't mine to carry. And I understood something about my work. I am not finished with birth. I just need to show up differently. Birth is still one of my languages. I don't have to abandon it. I get to expand what birth means. We birth babies, yes. The baby's perspective of arriving onto earth matters, yes. And we birth relationships, we birth identities, art, businesses, entire new versions of ourselves. Eventually she walked up the stairs where I was, I placed her stones back into her hands and told her clearly the old story is gone. You are not the same woman who arrived here. You have been rebirthed. And I meant it. I believed it, I still believe it as I say it almost two months later. On our last full day together, we went to Chalice Well. Chalice Well is known as the Red Spring because the water is rich in iron, giving its reddish-orangish color. The site has also accumulated centuries of sacred and grail mythology around it. And we were all dressed in white, and we spoke again as the temple keepers of our oil. What is the medicine asking me to become? How does she want to move through my life? What am I bringing home? And then something strange happened to me at Chalice Well. Deja vu. About a year ago, I studied dream birth, and one of the practices I've used with pregnant women is a visualization of entering into your own secret garden. I have always known what mine looks like. It's tended, but not tended too much. It's beautiful, but not manicured. There is shape and spaciousness, order and wildness. I remember doing the visualization in this dream birth training that I was doing and thinking, nope, don't touch it. My garden is exactly how I like it. And then when I walked through, and then when I walked through Chalice Well Gardens, something in me went, This is my garden. I know this. That balance of care and wildness, beauty without control. And maybe there's another metaphor for where I'm going, it's like tended, not controlled, sacred, not sterile, it's wild, but held. It all felt so familiar and just like so peaceful. I'd even take I barely took any pictures there because I I mean I barely took any pictures anywhere, but it just felt I was just so in the moment. Like I was just so loving this space. It was awesome. And then our last big adventure. This one was amazing. We went from the Chalice Well, we walked, so our last big adventure was walking from the Chalice Well up to the Glastonbury Tor. If you've seen photographs of Glastonbury, you've likely seen images of the Tor. It's a tall hill, and this lone stone tower is at the top of it. This stone tower is called Saint Michael's Tower. It's what remains of a medieval church dedicated to Saint Michael. And the Tor rises about 500 feet above the surrounding land. The hill has accumulated centuries of Christian, pagan, and Arthurian stories, including the tradition that Glastonbury is Avalon and folklore about an entrance into the Celtic otherworld beneath the Tor. And considering what our whole week had been about, the symbolism was perfect. Masculine, feminine, sacred union and reclamation. We climbed together. We went inside Saint Michael's Tower together. We were all in our white, we sang, the floor was even anointed, and we called in the noble masculine again. And something really landed for me there. So many women I know have spent years healing the feminine, and I have too, reclaiming the body, intuition, rest, sexuality, voice, our relationship with other women. But what happens next? Because we don't heal the feminine so she can exist alone. Maybe part of the next reclamation is the noble masculine, inside of us first, the part that creates structure, protects what matters. Discerns, builds the container, keeps the promise. The healthy masculine doesn't overpower the feminine. It creates enough safety and structure for her to move. And then what happens when we invite the men we love into that conversation? Not by monitoring them, not by fixing them, not by shrinking so they never have to grow, but by standing fully in ourselves and saying, Meet me here. And this is where something happened that I absolutely did not expect. There were visitors all over the tour, all around outside of where we were, waiting to come in to the tower that we were in. While we were in there, we invited anyone who wanted to come in to come in and get anointed. First people that wanted to come in were actually men. There were men that came in first to get anointed, to receive. They were curious. And it was really marvelous and mystical and magical to watch and to be part of all at once. Then we had time to separate ourselves from one another and go into Glastonbury. Before I even got five feet away from the one of the doorways of the tower that we were in, I saw some of my sisters talking to a man, and I could tell that they were feeling a little bit overwhelmed. And so I started to walk over in their direction, and he was a very curious man with a lot of questions. If you know me, I'm a question person. So I understood him. Something about what he had witnessed felt familiar to him. And he wanted to understand, what are you doing? What are all these oils? Why are you here? What does this mean? And eventually I had the opportunity to anoint him with Fediver. So much so that he took the time and sent an email to Priestess Presence about his experience of me anointing him. And I'm going to share his words with you because I don't know this man's name. I don't know where I can find him. And I think that his words are medicine for all of us. For women listening to this episode and this story, uh, to know that your innate gifts, your innate talents, your mystical self is here as medicine. Our men are ready for it. And for the men listening, we are ready for you as a noble man in your healthy masculinity. And we are so ready. So I'm going to share you his words here. Even as I am looking at this let this email again, I'm realizing he felt so called the same day that I saw him, and it was a freaking hot day. We were all sweaty, hot messes. That same and exhausted, right? Because you're climbing the tour. It's an exhausting day. But he had so much energy in him and felt so compelled that he took the time the same day to send an email to the priest's presence of his experience. And so here we go. Today I was anointed by a scent priestess at Glastonbury tour. I watched with interest and fun at the ceremonies and took some video. As you called people in, I was certain that as much as I wanted to dive in, I would not as I questioned my motives. You all looked so strong and accredited, feminine and joyful. In the end, one sent priestess, a cordial young blonde lady from Michigan, she proceeded to tell me about your group and that today was the day to give rise to the noble men and for them to revere and protect women. To also bring out my true masculinity and potential, which these days does not seem to be valued or even wanted. It made me wonder if my ascent to the Tora was not an accident but a calling to myself. I am here in search of something and direction. Her hands, and those of her sister priestess behind me, felt amazing. The scent fediver was wonderful. In that moment, she applied her hands to my head, neck, and arms. I felt in that moment heard and felt and understood, and as a world-level athlete in my past, I truly felt like a warrior being lifted by my queen, much like the Greek warrior King Leonidas. I am not sure what to do with this, but it certainly made me think and feel, and in that moment I did not want to leave. Long have I felt saddened by the gender battle and frustrated at the missed opportunities presented by a man and woman lifting each other. Maybe today this remarkable priestess for a moment gave me hope and a sense of manly value. Thank you for a magical moment in feeling and allowing my openness and vulnerability to be met with sacred and wonderful, non-judgmental feminine strength and love. I seriously felt it. Thank you. We're not all meant here to show up the same way. Otherwise, our world would be so boring and we wouldn't have amazing things to talk about or to learn about or to learn through someone. Thank you, man on the tour. Your words have touched me, and I am just so grateful you were open to this experience and that you shared your heart so openly, so that your story is medicine for all of us. I really had no idea when I walked away from him that this interaction would become one of the clearest confirmations of my entire pilgrimage to England. This man had no idea what questions I had been asking myself all week. He didn't know I had been wondering, is this really mine? Am I actually meant to do this? Is sent priestessing something I am supposed to bring into my life, into my work, into my world, into the world? And then this person who has no reason to affirm any of that reflected the medicine back to me. Not only in the oil, the interaction, the curiosity, the presence, the anointing, what he experienced. After reading his words, there was something in me that could no longer deny what I already knew. I am meant to step more fully into this work of scent precessing. And I think that's where this pilgrimage ultimately brought me to. Actually, I know it did. Avalon didn't give me a five-year business plan. It gave me something much more valuable. Permission. Permission to stop separating all the pieces of myself. The birth worker, the mother, the wife, the sensual woman, the priestess, the healer, the questioner, the mystic. The very practical woman who still has to come home, drive her kids' places and make dinner. All of her. And maybe that's what remembering really is. It isn't necessarily becoming someone new. Maybe it's becoming less willing to abandon the parts of yourself that were always there. And maybe that's why some places feel like portals. Not because they magically turn us into somebody else, but because for a moment the noise gets quiet enough that we can hear ourselves again. But eventually you do have to come home. And I think that's where the real pilgrimage begins. Can you take what you remembered there and live it here? Can you bring it into your marriage, into your relationships, your motherhood, your body, your work? Can you bring the sacred into your Friday morning? Can you actually live differently because of what you saw, what you felt, what you heard, what you experienced? Because I don't want spirituality that requires me to leave my real life. I want a spirituality that makes me more available for my real life. More alive inside of it. More loving. More fully myself. I went to Avalon wondering what the next expression of my medicine might be, and I came home realizing I don't have to throw away everything that came before. The birth work is still here. The mother is still here. The wife is still here. The woman is still here. I'm not becoming somebody completely different. I'm allowing more of myself to come into the light. And I think that's what Avalon gave me a remembering. And now I get to live it.