Pathfinding a New Career

In this essay I reflect on the heartbreaking but empowering story of leaving one world and learning how to step into another, of following the tension between external recognition and inner truth. Perhaps you experience something similar in your own life: the wish to reclaim parts of yourself that were never fully welcomed, the lack of like-minded community, the exclusion for being different.

It took me years to discover the subtle threads of the unique Wild Soul brew, that intertwines movement, nature, transformation and ritual practice. What emerged was a wider way of knowing, that includes body, soul, intuition, relationship and the living world. This essay is an invitation into that journey, perhaps in recognition of your own.

I began my academic journey rooted in the world of anthropology and later dance, and for a long time, I tried to bring these two fields into meaningful conversation. I was always drawn to exploring embodied knowledge, to the intelligence of the movement as first language, and to transformational practices embedded in the sacred and mysterious dimensions of life. Within academia, at best I felt like a nomadic translator without a homeland, forever explaining one realm in the language of another. At worst, I felt I had to sever parts of myself and leave them by the threshold when entering academic rooms, because body, soul and spiritual practice found no welcome there.

Eventually, this tension wore me out. I tried to squeeze wild, intuitive, healing work into frameworks that would be credible to scholarly peers. The ‘justification’ so essential to academic work became a ‘self-censoring’, both on page and in even within myself. This led to a painful tension between ‘finding my voice’ while silencing those parts not recognised in academic reflections.

In 2019 I literally nearly died because of overwork - but that’s a story for another time. More importantly, I continued to experience a deep soul-thirst. I yearned for a way of working that was aligned with my values: cyclical, relational, body-based and boldly with the spirits. I didn’t want to simply write about things anymore, with the ever apologetic distance of and apologetic mumbo-jumbo for ‘going native in spiritual practice’. I wanted to fully live and share these techniques. To teach from inside the experience, not from behind the pretend-objective lens.

Leaving this field in which I invested 20 years of blood, sweat and tears was one of the hardest decisions of my life. While I’ll be forever grateful for the thorough foundations of my academic path, I needed to reclaim my vitality elsewhere.

Perhaps this was a career shift. Embarking on a totally new venture in my early forties, of becoming a soulful entrepreneur - without any training for the business and marketing side of things, but deeply steeped in soulful and spirit lore!

Most definitely, it was an epistemological shift (*ontology = ‘what we know’, epistemology is ‘how’ we know’). A change in how I how I listen and perceive, what I consider worthy of attention. It included a reorientation toward time as well. In academia, even the most embodied fields are still governed by linear deadlines (the word alone is telling, don’t you think? Let’s talk about lifelines instead?), publications, impact trails, REF qualifications. I wanted to make sacred time for dreams, art, seasonal rhythms. My work needed to be rooted in lived experience, and in the more-than-human worlds that had been guiding me all along.

Don’t get me wrong, Wild Soul isn’t a rejection of scholarship or my wonderful academic colleagues, but an inclusion of its deeper origin, the yearning for expanding our understanding of our life worlds. I still love writing (as you can tell!), I still think critically, still do the deep work of anthropology to understand wisdom of cultures. But now I do it on different terms, in rhythm with earth, in conversation with wind and myth and movement. And also pioneering a different relationship with my body and my health.

Yes, relationship is at the heart of it this new. Relationship between body and land, self and soul, seen and unseen. I believe (what a joy, I can say it now!), I believe that when those relationships are tended, magic becomes possible. Not the kind of magic that escapes the world or forces desire into being, but the kind that helps you remember you already belong, and you are already whole.

You might think, “that’s easy for her to say.” However, this is not wishful thinking, but deeply interwoven with my everyday life. Since my early twenties I have Ankylosing Spondylitis, a chronic autoimmune condition on the rheumatoid spectrum. Qi Gong became an essential part of my healing and spiritual path. It offers no cure, but it teaches me daily how to listen differently to my body, and how to take my body into the day with me, not as a burden that holds me back, but as a companion I try to treat with care and tenderness.

Wild Soul emerges from that lived experience, and from the tools I gathered along the way. Some are practical: learning about pacing, consistency and self-care rather than intensity, knowing that rest is essential. Others are psychological: noticing the commentary of my inner critic, then learning how to gather myself again when I am overwhelmed or scattered. Others still are about life skills and conscious choice: saying no with integrity, and no longer living purely from momentum or inherited scripts or behavioural patterns. Finally, many are spiritual: remembering beauty, ritual, gratitude, mystery and relationship as genuine sources of nourishment.

These tools matter more than ever in a time of collective overwhelm. Evolutionary, we are hardwired to look at danger, because that helps us stay safe from the saber tooth tiger. We also have a tendency to seek nourishment outside of ourselves (shiny object syndrome :-). Both easily contribute to a nervous system that is constantly on the alert, outward focused, driven, dragged or pushed, with hardly any time to reset and return to soul time.

Sometimes the remedy can be simple: a walk without your phone, a few conscious breaths, movement that softens and reconnects, choosing a pocket of time away from demands.

If you feel in transition, between chapters, or aware that parts of you have been left behind in the effort to cope, achieve or belong, you are not alone. That is why this work feels sacred to me. It helps people come back into relationship with themselves and with life. Let’s find the way together!

And a big thank you to all colleagues at the Yale Symposium for Healing with the More than Human, for such a joyful reconnection with academia from a different perspective! You can read more about that experience and the workshop I hosted there in my earlier essay Move Back into Belonging.

Wild Soul Qi Studio (4 classes weekly, live on zoom and via replays - 14 days free!)

Encountering the Divine Mother in Neolithic Sacred Landscapes Presentation June 2026 S/He Divine Studies Online Conference

Avebury Summer Solstice Retreat 22-26 June 2026, UK, in person (women only)

Tai Chi Caledonia (I’m teaching four sessions on the weekend 4-5 July but there is a whole week of community and practice!)

Goddess Qi Gong (sign up for the Compass and be the first to hear about next course dates)

Pathfinder Programme for 1:1 Mentoring for embodied scholarship, resilient self, soulful business

Clearing the Way towards Soulful Scholarship

Calibrating the Body. Embodied Research Strategies for Attuning to Subtle Information

Somatics Toolkit for Artists and Academics