Welcome home, witches and wildlings.
Today I invite you to step into my cosy common room, get to know the wild witch whose whispers you are currently tuning into, learn a little bit about what this space is meant to be — and what I have planned for us in future episodes.
Let’s talk about this space first.
I built this house because this is the kind of space I wish had existed and had been available to me at a point in my life when all I needed was to pause, stop and look within. Today I am that space — and I offer my abundance to you.
Wild Witch Whispers is my offering to you. I open my heart for this space to become our home so you can listen to my story and learn about the steps I took on my path. By taking time with me, you will be able to open a room within yourself as well. As soon as you open your ears and, a little bit later, once you know me a bit better, open you heart — allow yourself to really listen.
You will change, and you will look at the world differently by next year.
I welcome you into a slow, safe, peaceful environment space where we take deep breaths together and tune into the quiet corners of our mind, step by step, as it becomes calmer and steadier bit by bit.
Within your quiet, another wild witch whispers. Once given the opportunity to truly rest, recharge and rewild, that creature will be starting to resurge. Inside the calmest corner of your quiet lives the deepest connection and that is the one with yourself. You must find it to open the final door.
Are you excited? Intrigued? A little scared? That’s okay. Everything unfamiliar comes with a dash of fear.
It is only normal to experience uneasiness or nervousness around new people, voices, rooms, settings. Don’t worry. I feel the same way. This is new for me, too. I’m very excited.
What to expect? What are these ‘whispers’?
In a nutshell, my offerings are of spiritual, intellectual and emotional nature. I believe balance is key but it is always up to you to pick and choose what you put in your bag and what you leave behind. So every episode will have a general topic, such as this one, titled Tuning the Whisper.
This is why we tune our own breath and slow our body, to understand how valuable it is to take one minute or two simply to focus on the thing you are doing now. And, for it to be one. Thing. only.
These episodes have many layers to them. I’ll share personal stories, I’ll give references to known stories. Stories of old, meaning legends, myths. I’ll be talking about spiritual ideas and buddhist wisdom — but, there will also be a layer of cultural history in terms of literature, art, movies, influential thinkers and so on and so forth. Personally I’m fascinated by psychology, sociology and philosophy alike — but also intrigued by the occult and somewhat obsessed with proto-christian religions.
So all in all you can expect a little bit of everything being whispered into your ear.
I am building and curating a bookshelf where you will be able to galavant and peruse at your leisure, find references from single episodes and learn about books and people that inspire my offerings.
The past and the becoming
As curious as it sounds, this podcast truly birthed itself. I am a reader and a writer and I have been writing since I could read and write. So after several decades, hundreds of books read, after writing reviews and having a Bookstagram channel and filming for BookTube, I started craving something more interpersonal and something more raw. A medium which would allow me to share more of myself — because I’m obviously not merely a book obsessed lady.
I am a forest creature, I grew up climbing trees and foraging for berries and mushrooms. So you could say that a witchy element, a connection to nature and an appreciation of all that that entails has also always been a part of my core.
I am also a buddhist, and have been for two decades. My daily life, my consumption habits and my personal philosophy align to buddhism.
The ultimate push to put this thing in motion was Death.
Death has been a friend to me for as many decades as books and my relationship with her has become a rather intimate one during the past years. So after going through severe hardship I believe that my core helped to survive, to center, to rewild and to resurge from a dark night of the soul into a very beautiful and balanced existence.
And this is something that everyone goes through It is a universal human thing to have some sort of crisis, moment of loss. How one deals with it and what deeper knowledge one takes from it is a decision. I hope to be helpful to you and hand you some tools that you can use when the time comes and you need to make that decision.
After Death left me in a very quiet place, I started listening very carefully. I traced all the lines along my soul and body, I contemplated the origins of my womanhood, my lineage, what did I come from, what did I inherit and how would I use it and the knowledge of it? What did the toil and tenure of the time I spent on this earth amount to? What lessons are written in the blood and the tears and the sweat — and where is the beauty of dark moments?
I was able to see those things and find balance in my life. I looked at how I started and what I went through and what it means — and somehow it all fell into place. So with this new sense of calm, I started building a home within myself because I finally had the tools and the means. Leaving my maiden phase and entering the state of mother, was the moment in my life where I understood how all those things that I am align perfectly — and how they provide me with the unique ability to share, to teach, to show, to tell — to help and to heal.
And therefore, I want to open the doors of this home to you, as Wild Witch Whispers. So whether you already know how to touch your deepest and scariest memory — and how to detach from everything you think you need — or you simply went through something similar and want to exchange thoughts, this is the spot.
Once we get acquainted, I’ll open the glass doors of the house that you can already look through now — you see how they open toward the forest, but a bit later is when we’ll start walking together, onward on a calm path through the cycle of moons and seasons and death and rebirth.
And then, once you know me well, we can be mothers and sisters and daughters to each other — in spirit, if not in person.
So, In this podcast, I mainly invite you to embrace yourself — as a woman, as a mother, as a sister and as a daughter — as the first and true love for you, as a home and safe space for you. No matter if you embody these roles actively at present, because even if there are none of these three archetypes connected to you, or walking this Earth at this time, even if you never knew a mother or a sister or a daughter — know that they are all present in the Universe, as chosen family — and they can be found, found again, and chosen again.
Because we are all — we all embody — maiden, mother and crone. Child, nurturer and wise woman.
After I myself not only learned this from others but saw that I also truly embody these energies, I felt ready to craft my current offering to you. Because I believe that we need this space to come together as a community.
As a reader and a builder of bridges I always feel inspired to connect dots and people and ideas by sharing quotes and thoughts from those who inspire and elevate my web of knowledge.
In this moment, two beautiful humans entered my path of thought. You would greatly benefit from getting to know them.
Turkish novelist and essayist Elif Shafak who mentiond a thought taken from Umberto Eco: books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told. Connections already exist. But it is up to the writer to find these connections and see where they live in their own environment, and then to tell their own stories to add to the known web.
Elif Shafak is a wonderful writer and I highly recommend her novel There Are Rivers in the Sky. I consider it a true masterpiece and I love how she connects lives and people to each other through the impact of forces of nature that they all witness and experience – and weaves a plot through centuries by pairing concepts of human suffering and challenges with significant historical events.
There’s mythology and phsychology and a bit of magic and lot of struggle – and a fantastic plot that will teach you so much about everything that that title means. Which you will discover when you read the book. Let me know when you do!
Another thought that resonated comes from the buddhist realm. Pema Chödrön is an American-born Tibetan Buddhist. She was an ordained nun and officially retired in 2020 but still gives interviews and is widely available to listen to on YouTube. I highly recommend looking her up and listening to her thoughts.
Pema expresses my own mission statement so wonderfully: Our hurting is a vehicle to connecting to humanity. Rather than our hurt be the thing that causes us to go inward and become more afraid – that very same suffering is a vehicle for causing us to realise our shared humanity. And that is exactly what I intend to do.
I intend to use exactly that vehicle to open, share and connect on the deepest human level. In the safe space I am building for us here, you are free to do the same.
Who is a witch?
To bring it all back to us, here, in short: Who is a witch, in today’s age?
Witch is short for: woman in total control of herself.
But this has nothing to do with supression or behaving nicely or adhering to standards. Quite the opposite.
It means holding within you vast forces of nature and understanding the whole depth of your light and your darkness. Unfortunately, to fully embrace the witch, you have to see your bones broken and your heart bleeding and look at them and mend them bit by bit by bit. Take the pieces and inspect them one by one to be able to fully grasp your own power.
This is what wilding is for, or rather will be for, in a later episode — because to see you have to look and to hear you have to listen. This is why the journey starts today with a whisper and it will continue to be a whisper, but, in due time the whisper will become the voice that you recognise and hear in a traffic jam or at a festival because the whisper lives inside you and that voice should be the loudest of them all.
Let’s look at the magic that you have inside you and tune into the whispers that will lead you into the wild to become the woman in control of herself, the witch, the witch you were always meant to be.
Start by asking yourself: What if you had the power to mute all sounds around you whenever you wanted to?
What if this also means that you would have the power to tune out any doubt or insecurity or negative beliefs about your worth and your goals and your voice?
What if you truly belived that this was possible, every day, for every small or big decision you make?
How much change do you think is possible with that power in your hands?
And how much work do you think it would take to achieve that power?
Let’s talk about mindfulness. And I don’t mean the pinterest kind, I mean the nitty gritty practical getting-down-to-it kind, where you neutrally detach and observe the situation you are in, and ask yourself with a full poker face: how does this feel right now? And while I admit that it seems very mystical and not easily actionable, it’s actually pretty easy to follow once you try once.
That doesn’t mean the once is going to be easy. When I went to a mindfulness seminar, after about 30 minutes I found myself thinking – what the hell is this is bs, I am going to go home first chance I get.
But then the teacher gave us actionable instructions and I decided to use them, to try to lean into them and I struggled. OH did I struggle.
But I stayed – and it changed something inside me.
Having just been there — in all my reluctancy — at the end of the day, it inspired a shift. Because by doing nothing, and by allowing quiet — I inspired a power deep within me that emerged from this one day of simple observation.
Mindfulness has seven pillars:
1. Non-Judging: Observing your thoughts without labeling them good or bad.
2. Patience: Allowing things to unfold in their own time.
3. Beginner’s Mind: Seeing the moment fresh, without expectations.
4. Trust: Developing a basic trust in yourself and your feelings.
5. Non-Striving: Letting go of the need to reach a specific goal right now.
6. Acceptance: Seeing things as they actually are in the present.
7. Letting Go: Releasing attachments to thoughts, outcomes, or distractions.
Our task was to choose and practice two, so I chose non-judging and non-striving to be my goals for the day. And even though I am able to comfortably meditate for up to an hour, she simply made us sit and observe ourselves for an unspecified amount of time, which truly irritated me. But pushing so hard on one’s comfort zone also does something to one’s baseline — because now, when I practice detached focus, it comes pretty easily because I know the situation and I understand the baseline and timeline of the topic at hand.
But what truly seemed so hard to grasp at the time is something I understand now: It was simply the concept of sensing.
This aligns beautifully with a podcast I experienced, a conversation between Zach Bush and Franko Heke — awakened physician and indigenous musician. Bush explains how we are taught that we should understand everything through what we see and give no space or attention to our senses or feelings, although our physical constitution enables us to actually see about 0,001% of what is going on around us.
It is essential to be able to just sit with a feeling and lean into it.
Incorporating moments of breathing and resting — body centered minutes and breathing focused windows — as a regular habit is essential if you want to get back in touch with your deeper self.
The idea of focusing on yourself, taking the time and space and energy to do a full body scan, just going from head to toe bit by bit, seems very foreign to many — and yet, your body will be grateful for you incorporating this practice into your day. Your distraction-fueled neural cirquit might have you fooled.
But your blood and bones and nervous system have not forgotten how good it feels when they get your full attention.
Nobody has time these days. But it is vital to make time. You have to allow yourself to sit back or to lay down on the floor only with the goal only to listen to yourself and give space to your mind to just be with nothing inside. To experience the quiet mind and to listen to the voice of your body.
And when you do that, when you keep doing that, then slowly, bit by bit, your entire nervous system starts recalibrating.
Take your time for deep breaths and reflect on the reaction of your mind and body, your heart and your gut, to what you heard and learned during your time with me today. To live with depth and meaning, the steps you take must be slow and deliberate. So I leave you today with a gentle smile — and possibly having inspired some mischief in that head of yours.
In Chapter two of Wild Witch Whispers, we will be talking about forests and lakes and dark spots and the wild undergrowth. We will be gently practicing how to embrace the wild. And gathering courage together to take a slow step further into a more complex realm. Something you might have not seen in a while — but a place you will recognise because you will be returning to a space that exists inside yourself.
So join me anew, in a moon, for Episode 2: Wilding the Witch.
I’m so excited for this next one.
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