Our wild, dark, erotic sides are where our power truly lies.
And yet exactly this side of us, women, had been shamed and suppressed for centuries all
over the world.
And now is the time that we finally learn how to look into our shadows, how to connect
to our sexuality, and how to play and love our entire selves.
Now is the time that we learn how to love and express ourselves fully and truly and
embrace the wholeness of a living experience in a female body.
In this episode I speak to Fiona MacCoss, a woman's mentor and transformational facilitator
in service to wild feminine embodiment, the erotic and the authentic.
She is passionate about awakening and activating unapologetic feminine energy and guiding women
back to the truths of their body, their sexuality, their voice, their pleasure, and their purpose.
You will learn about the dark feminine, the wild woman archetype, and shadow work, one
of the most transformational and powerful personal growth tools.
And explore ways of how you yourself can open up to more empowerment, expression, and authenticity
by connecting to the parts of yourself that you might have been avoiding or suppressing.
For us women, it is possible to have it all and embody our truth and power in all areas
of life.
Feminine Power Podcast is your guide to reconnecting with your feminine essence, reclaiming your
power and rising into your fullest potential.
I'm your host Maria Grinina, co-founder of F.I.L., the Feminine Embodiment Platform.
And here on this podcast I interview our expert community and our members.
And we together share transformative tools, intimate conversations, and embodiment practices,
bringing you a wealth of wisdom and practical tools to support your journey.
Follow this podcast for your weekly inspiration and if you'd like to go deeper into your
embodiment journey and the awakening of your sexual energy, check out our online membership
linked in this podcast description.
We've been conditioned to be nice and to people please and to be good, to fit in.
It's a safety mechanism that we've adopted over millennia of being the lesser sex.
We went from being the goddess incarnate to slave and subservient in a matter of centuries,
maybe even decades as the father god religions were really taking hold.
And as all the sacred sites that worshiped and venerated women were destroyed and all
of the pagan ways of living were kind of rewritten into Christianity and dogma, women, our role
and our worth shifted from being equal to lower than men.
And so we had to learn very quickly to be good, to be acceptable, to fit the rules of
the society at the time in order to survive.
And so we developed a very strong like foreign response to danger, to threat, which could
have been father, could have been side, could have been husband, could have been brother,
could have been friend.
And this if we think like epigenetically or collectively, ancestrally is such a strong
imprint in our psyche and our soma that it's really only in the last decade or this century
that women are actually learning to unfreeze our systems and to find a sense of safety
in power and inequality.
Because before we could have died at the hands of our fathers or at the hands of men for
being outspoken, for being a sexual woman, for having a job, for all of the things that
threatened men's status.
And it was just safer for us to follow the rules than to be outcast onto the fringes
of society and be homeless and have to fend for ourselves.
So we've kind of learned this really distorted dependency with men and with the masculine,
we see the victim, we see the damsel.
And now we're really beginning to challenge these shadows and these archetypes that are
so in our subconscious and so natural to so many of us and actually find safety in power.
And also what that means is having to redefine what power means.
Because I think for so many women too, all we've learned of power is power over, domination,
violence, suppression, silencing.
That's how the old paradigm exerted their power is like from the top down.
Whereas women as we're rewriting and re-experiencing power, it's like a circular power.
It's like I have power, you have power, we have power together.
We give another woman power, we empower each other.
It's not about who has the most power, I win.
It's like how can we all hold and be in our power together?
And I think that's really shifting.
It's still obviously we're not fully there yet.
But I think there's a lot of swinging back of the balance and the pendulum when women
go from such a state of like fall or freeze or feeling of disempowerment and having been
violated in whatever way to then being like, fuck this and go full wild woman.
But actually it's not the wild woman.
It's like a very distorted shadowy expression of the dark feminine, of everything that's
been repressed in them collectively.
And it comes out like chaos, destruction, it's harmful.
It's not expressed in integrity and it's not expressed in a grounded way.
And this is why most people don't understand the difference between dark, wild and shadow.
They just think the wild and the dark is the shadow because not many people have a healthy
understanding or role model of how to express everything that they've repressed up to that
point.
Yeah.
And I get it.
It can feel so rebellious to just be like, fuck this, fuck the system, fuck the patriarchy
and go and like create mayhem.
But it's like, okay, well actually that's just fighting fire with fire and that's not
actually creating any collective change or beneficial impact to anyone.
Beautiful.
I feel like, whoa, we can unpack quite a few things here.
And I want to bring it into context by sharing a little bit of my story that came just as
you've been describing the generational conditioning.
The image of what my grandmother shared with me came through because in my family, on my
father's line, my grandmother is a powerful entrepreneur woman.
And in Soviet Union, back when she was growing up and in her 20s, 30s, 40s, basically her
major life was still Soviet Union and entrepreneurship was not legal.
You could not even run your own business.
Even selling your vegetables was not really allowed because you had to receive only from
the government and only what they say.
And she was growing vegetables in one area and then knew that in the other village they
don't have food now.
So she would go and like sell them there.
She was always an entrepreneur and then she built lots of businesses.
What happened to her once is, I mean, she had a lot of shit coming through to her as
a result, like a single mother trying to make money in those times.
And once the people came to take away the money and they've put an iron onto her body
to torture her because they wanted to take away the money because she wasn't supposed
to be making the money.
Long way forward from that, now me building my business, living in London, trying to be
that, you know, have it all.
I have so much block around making my own money.
Although I've made a lot and I'm like, I'm an established entrepreneur and I'm working
on that a lot.
But on the nervous system level, I have to go through so much contraction and I've been
addressing this generational trauma of women cannot make money.
It's dangerous to make money.
If you make money, you're not going to be loved by men or you can't have relationships
or you're not going to be a good mother.
So much conditioning while it was my conscious self, I understand this is an opportunity
to work through it.
But I'm feeling like, whoa, we women, we have to look into the depth of what is it that's
in the way of us getting what we want because there is a lot.
And coming from here into the concept of shadow is that's what I thought I can lead into with
this story.
How can we work on these things?
In your view, how do we work on all these conditionings we have around power?
Where do we start?
I think a really easy place is just with a pen and paper and getting really honest with
yourself, but being like, okay, what is the thing that I want?
Same money.
And then take a little sip of true serum and be like, right, what are all the fucking bullshit
things I tell myself around why I can or cannot have money, why I can or cannot hold money?
What are the fears that I have around money?
And beginning, it might be like, oh, I'm afraid if I have money, I might spend it all or I'm
afraid if I have money, my friends will think I'm a rich bitch, whatever.
All of the things, but just get it out because it's like, as soon as we see these things
and write them down on a piece of paper, we give it consciousness and we see, it's like
we take the bite out of some of it.
It doesn't mean that they're gone poof forever.
That's not how it works.
But we're getting really honest with ourselves and holding ourselves accountable at some
of the things that we know we narrate inside us.
It's like, this is not our voice.
This is the voice of patriarchy.
This is a voice of parents.
This is a voice of whoever, uncle, whoever told us the thing that keeps us spiraling
into this self doubt is not our voice.
And so in doing this really brave self inquiry of finding those shadows and finding the beliefs
and then feeling where they're held in the body, so you might pick one out of the list
and be like, oh, okay, I'm scared of having too much money because I'm going to spend
it all and then be like, oh, where does that fear come up?
Oh, I can feel it in my solar plexus.
Okay, I'm going to breathe into that feeling and I feel that feeling in my solar plexus.
I'm going to let it be there because we have such a fear of feeling uncomfortable things
that it's like, oh, I'm feeling fear in my body.
Oh, I just want to get rid of it.
I'm going to go scroll on my phone or I'm going to go drink a glass of wine or I'm going
to go eat some chocolate or something.
I mean, we've all been there.
I do it.
And it's like, okay, well, how can we actually sit with what's uncomfortable?
So we're sitting with both the story, but we're sitting also with the feeling.
I think it's less about getting rid of it, but actually creating more space for it.
So that then it's like, okay, this is here again.
Oh, I see you.
I know that this is a story that I heard from my mom.
Okay.
And each time we gain more conscious awareness on the story, on the feeling, we can move
through it a lot quicker.
So here, would you in a nutshell explain what is shadow work?
Because I understand you're describing it and I would love to share with listeners in
a little bit in a nutshell, what does that mean and why does it work so well?
The term shadow was coined by Carl Jung, a psychoanalyst in the mid 1900s.
He really brought unconscious and subconscious work to the mainstream.
And it's essentially, the shadow is essentially beliefs, behaviors that are deemed unacceptable
in a vertical by our society, by our family, by our culture, that we may recognize that
we have, but we deny them space, that we deny them visibility, we deny them feeling or validations.
A lot of the times it could be something sexual.
There's usually a lot of like sexual shadows because like, oh my goodness, I can't possibly
have that king.
Or like, oh my goodness, I can't possibly want that thing.
And so in feeling that there's this rubbing up against what's acceptable and what's unacceptable,
what's in the good camp and what's in the bad camp, whatever we think is in the bad
camp, we shove away into the dark crevices of the subconscious.
And then sometimes it becomes unconscious.
It becomes so repressed that because we're not going into the dark and we're not kind
of shining a light on these pains, these parts of us that are unacknowledged, they become
really distorted and can kind of come out in harmful and dangerous ways.
Because if we actually do the work and the shadow work to go into the subconscious and
unconscious and realize what are all the stories and I'm not actually allowing myself to believe?
What are all the desires and I'm not allowing myself to acknowledge?
What of myself am I denying?
And I think in order to step into our unapologetic wild essence, we have to get really brave
at doing the shadow work, at looking at our bullshit and looking at the too much wound.
It's like if we don't really look at the beliefs that underpin why we think we're too much,
we're just going to be chained by this word too much for the rest of our lives.
In order to inhabit our wholeness, we must integrate everything and that's the good and
the bad and remove all the fucking labels in the first place.
To me, this is the most powerful work that I would do for myself.
If I want to change something or receive something or get myself to the next level, it is a shadow
that I would usually want to see.
I wish more people in the world understand this and do more of this because in reality
in our dopamine driven, fast-paced, numb world, what we usually do is just we run away from
everything.
We only want to feel good things and then the bad things, we'll label them bad and then
we just never look at them and then we're stuck forever.
That's so important to understand and integrate and work with it.
Having said that, what's the difference between the dark and the shadow?
Let's get there.
I will get there in one second.
I also just want to add something just to the last point is because our good gut conditioning
is so strong, it's also why we're so afraid of doing the shadow work because we just want
to be perfect.
We're in denial so much of the time.
We're like, I can't possibly have any shadows.
I can possibly have anything wrong with me.
It's like in that pedestalizing of our perfection, we feel the split within us so much.
We feel the split between light and dark, light and shadow, good and bad so much because
we haven't integrated our wholeness and that involves the ugly as well as the imperfect
as well as the perfect.
If anybody wants to explore more of this one book that's really good is Existential Kink
by Carolyn Elliott.
It's a really good place to start if you're new to shadow work.
That is a really helpful tool to have on your bookcase always if you want a helpful guide
into shadow work and brave self-inquiry.
Beautiful.
I will link it in this episode notes.
You asked me what's the difference between dark and shadow.
Yeah.
As I said, the shadow is everything that we deem unacceptable and everything that we feel
is unwelcome to express.
The dark feminine, essentially this is like the original blueprint of feminine, what feminine
is, the original blueprint of woman.
Because as we've been talking about, the good girl and the light aspects of the feminine
have been given so much airtime in this world.
We love the maiden, we love the mother, the virgin, the Madonna, these aspects and archetypes
of woman are venerated.
We see them on try and think of Aphrodite, her golden hair and her voluptuous body.
This is woman through the male gaze.
She's either virgin and pure or she's mothering and holy.
That's what we've all been told through our society and culture of millennia, patriarchy
is what a good woman should be and then what's acceptable.
So anything that's not that has been repressed into the shadow.
That mostly is the dark feminine because the qualities of the dark feminine are like the
archetypes would be the hag, the witch, the crone, the wild woman, the seductress, the
whore.
I love these aspects of the feminine that connect us to our wildness, to our magic,
to our mystery, to our mysticism, to our sex, to our pleasure, to our seduction, to cycles
of life, death, rebirth, to our wisdom, to our aging process, to decay, to our blood.
That doesn't go along with what we want to see a virgin and mother.
We're like society is like, oh, that's horrible.
That's ugly.
That's messy.
That's gross.
We don't want to see that or that's too tempting.
You know, if it doesn't fit in the Bible's version of woman, it's shoved into the shadow.
But actually that is what is the dark feminine.
So the dark feminine is not the shadow, but we've been made to feel that it is because
of it not having a place in this world.
But actually the dark feminine is like, is everything.
It's the fertile landscape of the feminine.
It's like nothing grows without the dark feminine.
There's no life without death.
There's no life without sex.
There's no life without seduction because what we bring two people together, the qualities
of the feminine that make women truly powerful are the dark feminine.
But because as we've been saying, that is too threatening for the men who are in power.
We had to deny and reject all that and become the good girl because we were slaves, we were
commoditized, we were sold, we were bartered.
There is a real cultural returning to the dark and there's, you know, lots of people
are talking about it now and offering really beautiful medicine and journeys back to owning
and embodying their dark feminine.
And I think it's like, you know, this pendulum swinging is we've been so far in the light,
we've been so far in the good girl that there is, there has to be this kind of swinging
back until we find a kind of a middle ground and an equilibrium.
I think a lot of people, myself included, swung really hard the other way.
And so I always want to just caveat and say like, the dark feminine is not about what
you look like, it's not about what you wear, it's not about what you fucking say.
It's about how wholly you accept all of yourself.
Yeah.
Now it sounds when you describe the dark feminine for me like this is the most juicy things,
like most amazing powerful things that had to get here.
What I've been remembering now, I'm like, whoa, I had this fantasy of just stripping.
I'm like, I want to be, can I just work as a stripper for like a couple of days or weeks?
Is that okay?
And I'm like, hmm, such a bad thought.
Oh my God, I'm so dirty.
I'm so terrible.
I would never do that.
I cannot tell anyone about it.
And it's like that's what would empower me so, so much.
Now I mean, that's for me, this is now an exercise that I do to like embody my previously
rejected part and where I would feel, oh my God, now I feel so good.
I would never be able to feel like that as a nice girl.
So what else can we women do to rewild our nature to also come back to the darkness,
to embody it, to love it and to stop rejecting it so much?
That's a great question.
I love that you do that.
And I actually think I have a very similar desire and it's such a common one too, especially
this integrating of the whole.
Yeah, like subverting the male gaze.
Yeah, like I want to do it for me.
Exactly.
It's such an empowering practice and there's so many more pole dancing studios now than
there have been and so many women going into like empowered stripping and things stepping
into sexual empowerment in that way is a really potent gateway.
But for rewilding ourselves, I actually really think it starts with the menstrual cycle.
If we don't understand our innate cycle and our inner rhythms, we're kind of just lying
to ourselves anyway.
So I think really asking yourself what kind of contraception am I taking and why?
When I come back to the natural rhythm of my cycles, what kind of products do I use?
Am I afraid of my blood?
Why am I afraid of my blood?
How can I get really intimate with my mess, my chaos?
Because as soon as you start connecting with your cycle, you're in your dark feminine,
you're integrating the wholeness of all the archetypes in one cycle.
And so that's a micro of a macro.
So I think start there is like baby step.
And then when you understand the inner cycle that you're moving to, you kind of extrapolate
that and be like, okay, now I'm noticing that I am so many different versions of myself
within this cycle.
And then exploring maybe the latter half of the cycle.
So like the premenstrual, whatever you connect to most, the wild woman in this phase or the
priestess.
And then in your bleeding phase, the wise woman or the crow or the hag and really spending
time rewriting your relationship to the negative part of your cycle is such a powerful gateway
into just self acceptance and compassion for parts of yourself and parts of the collective
and parts of women that you may have denied before.
How many times do we just take the contraceptive pill to just not bleed?
Or we take loads of paracetamol to not feel our cramps.
And it's like, we're not really in tune with what's happening in our body.
And so it's like, we want to actually get really ugly with ourselves.
We want to kind of be in a bit of pain.
We want to die so that it brings us closer to actually what it is that we've been repressing
on a larger scale.
And I think for the wildness piece, again, it's not about where you live.
You don't have to move to a cabin in the woods.
You don't have to grow your armpit hair out.
You don't have to do all these radical things.
You might want to, but it's not like how you will rewild yourself.
It could start very simply.
It just starting to strip away the masks and starting to strip away the artificiality from
your life and getting really honest with who you are beneath all of the facade, beneath
the performance, beneath the filters, beneath the fucking makeup, all this shit that we
feel that we need to have in front of ourselves, like a shield before we step out into the
world, removing all of that, like stripping away the veil.
That is wild.
That is wildness.
It's just truth.
It's just authenticity.
It's like, who are you as an organic expression of yourself?
Yeah, as I'm listening to this, I'm like, well, if I was listening to it as more of
a teenager, I would be very scared of it.
As a teenager, I'm like, well, no makeup, no all of these things that I'm supposed to
have.
No, who are these weird women?
No, as more of an adult, I understand how empowering this all is and how amazingly it
contributes to a beautiful life.
What does it do for a woman when she starts rewilding, when she starts connecting to her
cycle, when she starts to just be more herself this way?
I think it's important to mention for a lot of women, the first thing that comes up is
grief, deep sadness and grief for maybe years that they've lost, living in a way that's
inauthentic to themselves or being in relationships where misaligned to who they are or even dangerous
or violent, especially an older woman who might be like, oh my God, I wish I came across
this work or this permission slip is really what it is.
I wish I had given myself the permission slip younger in life.
There might need to be a little bit of grieving and mourning for that, but ultimately, what
it feels like to me anyway is you just get to breathe fuller and breathe more deeply
and live without that heavy burden or worry every day of like, oh, I need to be perfect.
I need to get it right.
I need to be good.
When you really step into your wildness and give yourself full permission to be you, it's
not that you care less, but you use the care and the worry that you would have for something
else for something way more important than how you think you're perceived in the world.
To me and to my clients, it's like they just feel like this huge sense of coming home.
I know that it's like they didn't realize that they needed it until they found themselves
again.
They don't realize how maybe disconnected or distant they are from themselves until
they do the work of stripping everything away and they come back to that truth.
It's like, oh shit.
It can be quite affronting sometimes because it can be like, oh my God, these are all the
ways that I self-sabotage.
These are all the ways that I've thrown obstacles in front of me so that I couldn't get to where
I needed to go.
Actually what it feels like to me is just to give this huge permission slip of like,
you just get to be who you were fucking born to be.
A lot of it to me feels a rewilding work is like inner child work.
To me, the wild woman and our inner child walk hand in hand.
In order to be wild, we need to feel safe.
Our inner child needs to feel safe.
In order for our inner child to feel safe, it needs the protection of the wild woman.
To me, these two aspects walk hand in hand and it can feel really beautiful kind of returning
back to that child.
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Well, I would love you to share and maybe let's talk about the work itself because it's
so beautiful what you describe what happens to people when they actually get on this path,
to themselves and finally leave and are who they are.
What does the work mean actually?
What does it mean to do the work to get there?
Oh, I mean, it can look so many different ways depending on each person, depending on
their journey, their trauma, their desire for what they want to be and what their true
expression is.
And I kind of just want to unpack the word like unapologetic a bit too, because I think
that word is given a lot of like spice.
Oh yeah.
And it's like sexy and it can be provocative and it's like, oh yeah, let's be unapologetic.
And like, I think people can think unapologetic is like loud, bold, ballsy, swears a lot,
doesn't give a fuck.
You know, all these things that people can be like, oh, I wish I was just more unapologetic.
I wish I was like her.
I wish I that it's less about what you do or how you do it that makes you unapologetic.
It's like how little you care about how it's received.
Because ultimately to be unapologetic is just to be yourself.
Because we're so attached to us, the social perception that we have, we think that we
have to wear the mask or wear the t-shirt or like fit in the clothes that make us look
like the unapologetic person or the wild woman or the slut or the whatever.
And it's like, it's less about what it looks like on the outside, but who you're being
on the inside.
And I say that because each journey for each woman is going to be so different because
her baseline of where she's beginning is so different.
So actually sometimes when they come to me and they're like, oh, I'm already unapologetic.
I'm already loud.
I've already got 10,000 million followers on Instagram.
I'm already an influencer, whatever.
And then you chip away at some of the stories and some of the bullshit, you know, doing
the shadow work.
Most of it starts with deep self-inquiry first.
And it's like beneath that all is oftentimes like quite a scared little girl who has just
learned how to be loud to be validated in the world.
It's like, well, if I'm loud and if I'm pretty and if I put wear a loads of makeup and if
I like really use that to get ahead, then I'm safe.
Yeah.
To me, it's like strip all of that away and just come back to like who you are as your
beautiful, wild, innocent, authentic self.
That is your unapologetic self.
When you can show that, that vulnerability in the world without caring about how many
likes you get, without caring about how much money you make, without caring about how many
dollars you get or people in your program.
When you can share that person to the world and sleep well at night and not have any anxiety,
it's like then you've tapped into your unapologetic energy.
Beautiful.
That's amazing.
And I love that you say it's indeed so unique to everyone, but the work there so often meets
that little girl inside.
Yeah.
Would you like to touch upon the inner child work?
What is that and how does it work?
I mean, I think we also need to be a little bit careful now because it's like I'm not
a therapist.
Yeah.
I'm not going to pretend that I'm qualified to take people back into like deep childhood
memories and stuff.
But I do think as a coach, mentor, or spaceholder, or guide, it's inevitable that childhood stuff
is going to come into the space.
So I just am saying this for anybody who's listening and it's not always easy or recommended
to necessarily go into inner child stuff, especially if there's like a lot of big trauma
in client history.
But when we can kind of explore in a child where I can maybe pick a year or a few years
of somebody's life and sit in especially where did some of these beliefs come from?
So say like the good girl, cast your mind back.
When was the first memory you had maybe of being told you were a good girl?
Who told you you're a good girl, was it your mom, was it your granny, was it your dad,
your teacher?
I mean, then you start to build like a memory frame of being like, whoa, I've actually been
physically told that I was good for a very long time.
Okay, interesting.
And then you might go layer under and be like, all right, what was the some of the things
that I was doing when I was told I was a good girl?
Maybe they were like, you were being quiet at the dinner table.
Maybe you got all these stars.
I don't know, whatever it was.
And there's like, okay, so these are maybe some of the behaviors that I still exhibit
in my adult life that I still seek approval for.
Oh shit, I was doing them when I was seven.
Okay, right.
And it helps us when we kind of go back in time and sit with our younger self and take
a gentle trip down memory lane and we can really start to piece together pieces of the
puzzle and be like, whoa, I've actually been, this is an imprint from how long.
And sometimes it might be like, oh, I remember seeing my mom do that.
So actually she was being a good girl and I was copying her.
So it can be really interesting to go into it and to with it too, it's like you're taking
a dose of self-compassion and you're taking a dose of like, we're not going to create
a wound here.
That's not what we're doing, but we want to like lovingly look back into the past so that
you can kind of get a wider perspective on maybe some of the reasons why you believe
some of the things and they tend to be, you know, the shadow or the limiting beliefs.
You're recognizing that you have these stories and these patterns within you from childhood.
Okay, that's beautiful.
And we know that.
So then how do you want to show up and move forward in the future?
And so then every time you have this like little voice coming through with that conscious
awareness, you might take a moment and a pause and be like, oh, okay, whose voice is that?
And it just, it makes you less reactive or it helps you spiral less into the doom and
gloom of thinking you're not good enough or you haven't got it right or you'll be canceled
online for saying the wrong thing.
Yeah, I've definitely, I'm asking this and it's so good to hear your answer because I
feel like there is so much talk around inner child work and it's important for people to
understand what it is and choose the right path for themselves if they want to explore
it.
For me personally, I do a lot of my self-compassion and that's, I love that you explain it from
this loving and compassionate space.
For me, just recognizing that they have little pieces of myself that I have from a very long
time ago and like recognizing them and then giving myself acceptance and compassion in
a moment or a bit of like allowance or playfulness or even permission for me to like, oh, okay,
now I'm going to be too much in my inner child, but it's kind of okay.
That just feels good to have acknowledgement.
You know, ultimately it's, you're reparenting yourself in that moment and that feels really
powerful if maybe giving yourself something that you didn't receive at the time and knowing,
okay, little, you really wanted a cuddle.
Maybe she was told off for being too much and she didn't receive a cuddle when actually
she just wanted to be herself and be expressed and you have this like pain in you or a wound
of feeling like you'll be rejected every time you express yourself in a certain way.
So yeah, as you say, when you access a memory like that with loving compassion, you can
ask yourself like, what would you have wanted to receive in that moment?
It could be a little cuddle.
It might be like a cup of tea.
You might want to go and get like a soft toy.
And I do think it's really beautiful.
You know, we can still bring the past into the present and have that beautiful alchemy.
Right.
Fiona, would you like to share your favorite practices?
What do you do for yourself now as, you know, in the Bowerd Facilitator?
You know what, I'm not very good with a routine.
I need somebody who needs like a lot of flexibility and freedom.
So I, yeah, I've tried a routine and they don't often work for me.
So I don't have like some, I don't have like go-to daily practices, but some of the things
I really love is, you know, the practice you put your right hand on the side of your left
rib cage where your breast would be and then your left hand over your right shoulder and
just sitting there in this like gentle holding and breathing with your arms around you is
such like a quick practice to just drop and like regulate yourself if you're feeling stimulated,
if you've just come off a call or something and you're just feeling a bit alive and you
just want everything to just calm down.
That one is just a really simple one to do at the bus stop, to do when you're sitting
down, to do anywhere.
So I find myself doing that one a lot.
I also co-regulate with my dog a lot.
I love to give her cuddles.
And me and my partner, we also give each other a full body hug every time both of us ask
her.
So just finding people around you or things around you that you can co-regulate with,
be it a housemate, an animal, if you have a partner, those are just being with another
heartbeat and breathing together and having that closeness and intimacy without any expectation.
I really love.
And yeah, movement practices, you know, I go to yoga anyway, that just feels really
good in my body and pilates, but also just non-linear movement, whacking out your yoga
mat and just moving your body any way that feels good.
I love TRE practices, especially for the hips and for the legs.
And yeah, just any practice that also invites me into a rocking motion.
So often I'll just lie on my side in bed and just rock myself over my side body.
Nothing crazy.
I'm not into activating practices.
I'm not really into breath work.
For me and my disposition, I'm quite fiery and quite airy.
I need a lot of grounding.
So I have a really beautiful energetic chiropractor as well that really helps me get in my body
because I can, especially when I'm working, I can just like fucking like so easy for me
anyway to dissociate when I'm working and I just get so excited.
And it's actually what I really need to do is ground back into my body because I can
be quite airy.
I always just want to say to people, find something simple and do it often.
It doesn't have to be like a three hour fucking ritual or whatever.
You don't need to go to a spa.
Spa is beautiful if you want to go, but it's like you don't need these fancy things to
find your way back in.
Often you just need a bit of time and your intention and both hands and your breath and
that's really all you need because I think that's actually radical in a world where we're
quite dependent on tools and practices and like things outside of ourselves.
I think just reminding yourself it gets to be really easy and you have everything already
inside you just to do it.
That's kind of what's coming to mind.
Something simple to be consistent.
I love that.
Yeah.
Because sometimes people are like, oh, to transform now I have to do like one hour in
the morning at 5 a.m. of this thing and then in the evening can you do that and this becomes
a full time job and that's why people don't do it.
Yeah.
That's like, I will not wake up early and I will not exercise late.
Like that just does not feel good for my body.
I tried that for years and it was just it.
Then it felt it became an addiction.
I swapped my eating disorder for addiction to exercise.
It was another way of controlling my state and my appearance and how I felt about myself.
So to me when I approach any kind of practice I do it with like, why am I doing this?
You know getting really conscious of the why because some of the shadows will still be
there.
It's not like they go away forever.
Yeah.
So I could resonate with this.
I'm also not like a can't do routine and I don't wake up early.
No shame.
No shame for that.
Lastly, I would love you to share a little bit about what's happening at your retreats
and trainings.
So what do people expect there?
What should they expect there?
Oh, what should they expect?
So I have two retreats next year, one Wild Honey in Greece and Wild Eros in Ibiza and
Wild Honey is all around exploring women's pleasure and sensuality.
So we work with beautiful, gentle practices, deeply nourishing practices into just expanded
states of pleasure.
So not always sexual pleasure, but just full body pleasure.
We work a lot with the theme of erotic innocence and the maiden and the lover.
That retreat is a really yummy, juicy and extremely expansive retreat because so much
of what women need is actually to retreat, is to peel away from real life and give and
fill themselves up, fill up their cup and give themselves something truly nourishing
and regulating.
And Wild Eros is a little bit more spicy.
We work with a more erotic practices.
It's a retreat all around the erotic feminine.
So we'll work with some of the archetypes I mentioned like the whore and we'll bring
the explore like the slut expression and work with the seductress or moving more sexual
energy.
And also it's very playful, like we're in Ibiza.
The energy of the island really just inspires this beautiful like sister connection and
intimacy and like platonic pleasure and it's really beautiful.
And yeah, my training is a facilitator training.
So for women who want to take maybe what they're offering if they're coaches or yoga teachers
or guides, if they're wanting to take what they're doing even deeper and create spaces
that are truly transformational.
There are five pillars to the work that I offer in as wild bodies.
So all around, you know, connecting to our primal body, working with our nervous system,
wild honey, so pleasure sensuality, kind of the subtle feminine, wild-era, sexuality,
the erotic feminine creativity, wild fire, which is your expression and the movement
you want to make in this world.
How are you showing up?
You know, your big pussy energy, the influence you're making and then wild devotion like
your legacy, your leadership and the liberation that you're here to influence.
So we journey through all of those modules and their practices, their practicum, so you
learn how to hold space from a deeply regulated space yourself, but also how to support your
clients into their bodies and through trauma-informed lens, supporting them to access more pleasure,
supporting them to connect with their sexuality.
And then you learn how to bring kind of all of that into business.
So into your marketing, into your offerings, into your leadership.
It's a really beautiful and powerful offering.
We have women from all around the world.
And this year there's an in-person facilitation retreat as well, because I feel that there's,
I don't see it so much on the market if at all actually is that online training, you
know, we're online so much.
In Zoom works all the time, we have so many online clients, but so many more women now
are wanting to step into in-person events, in-person retreats.
And so the training now includes a week of in-person facilitation training at the end
too to get real life like in-person practice.
So I'm really excited.
I am celebrating you here.
Oh, yeah, sounds super good.
And I must say the Eros retreat sounds super juicy, like for me, for what I would do, it
sounds really good.
All of them are beautiful to do at different stages of life.
Yeah.
If you resonate with Fiona's work, we invite you to check out her wild honey and wild Eros
retreats.
And as a listener of this podcast, you can get £100 off with the code WDFL100.
Check this episode description for details.
And that's it for today.
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I'm your host, Maria Grenina.