This is what grew.

The Autumn Equinox came to Geneva at twenty-five degrees.

Sun on bare arms, the lake still warm enough to swim. This is far from the turning we are told to expect at this time of year. And yet - the air has had its edge at sunrise for weeks now, and the first leaves are already down. Not yet an orchestra beneath my feet. Single instruments, still finding their tune.

I told you I would write once the Harvest container closed. It has closed.

Eight women. Eight weeks. One long, unhurried look at money, worth, receiving, and reciprocity. It opened at Lughnasa Festival, in the first days of the Harvest, and it completed here - at the Autumn Equinox, the hinge where day and night stand level, before the dark begins, slowly, to win.

Each of them asked for something throughout the weeks. I watched every one of them receive, with hesitation, without apology, with desire for more.

What I keep returning to, now that it is over, is the word itself. Harvest. A harvest is not a beginning. It is not reaching, or striving, or becoming. It is a season that asks you to stop and count what is already in the basket. What grew. What you have.

And I have noticed how strange that is to us. How unpractised. How uneconomical. How impractical when you are striving to make more money, have more time, to build a different life.

I spend much of my life inside movements that love living things - regeneration, sustainability, non-hierarchical collectives, the repair of what we have broken. I love those rooms. And I have started to feel how often they speak to us in the language of deficit. What we are not doing. What we are failing at. What is running out, and how far behind we already are.

Can we, sometimes, turn and point instead at life - at what it is already doing?

The botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the serviceberry, a plant whose answer to a good year is not to hoard the surplus but to give it away. Abundance, in her telling, is not a problem the natural world solves by grasping. A good year is a year with more than enough, and more than enough is shared. I read her and something in me exhales, because I recognise it - it is the same intelligence eight women spent eight weeks learning to trust in the matter of money. That there might already be enough. That receiving is not taking.

I will be honest with you: I love my summer wardrobe most of all. Some part of me leans towards the sun and would keep it forever if it could. The appreciation I feel now did not arrive by pretending otherwise. It arrived by stopping. By taking harvest of what I have, and what I still desire, and letting those be two true things that can live in the same body without cancelling each other out.

This is the same practice I return to with the body, again and again. Not to move past what is here - the tiredness, the grief, the ache, the joy - on the way to something better. But to stop long enough to let it be counted. To say: this is what grew.

A GIFT

This week I would rather give you a way to feel it than write more about it.

I gave this practice on the first evening of our container, and it is the one I want to give you now. It is called The Having.

It is two felt sentences. You name something you currently have - I have … - and then you stay long enough to feel, in the body, that you have it. And then I feel … how does having this make me feel.

It is not a gratitude list. Gratitude lists live in the head. This one lives in the rest of you.

It is strongest when the thing arrived today, and repeated multiple times per week. It doesn't have to be big, it is allowed to be very small. Some mornings mine is: I have fresh sheets. I feel comfortable and cosy and thankful for having brought them from Portugal. And there is never really just one feeling - mine, on the evening we began the Harvest, was - I have a ticket to a Bluegrass Festival at the end of the week. I feel stoked - and inside the thrill there is some nervousness, because I have never been.

A few minutes, eyes closed, before you start your day. Or thirty seconds, in the middle of your day. Change is in the repetition. Those narratives - what I have, what I don't have, what I should want - have been running for years. They are deeply wooded.

🎧 If you'd rather hear the practice. Listen to The Having

Let it count what is already in your basket.

The dark is coming. I can feel the pull already, the wanting to bolt into busyness before the quiet arrives. We will get to the dark - it has its own wisdom, and we'll celebrate it together.

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This week I only want to ask you what I asked them, before the light turns all the way down:

Tell me, what is already in your basket this year? What grew - quietly, without your forcing it? And when you have it, tell me what it did in your body.

Hit reply. I read every single one, and your experience is part of how I understand this more fully.

The dark I said we would get to - we get to it on Monday 2 November, 19:00 CET. Samhain, the season the old year turns to face the dark. Free, online, ninety minutes, women only.

🕯️ Save my place for Samhain Celebration

with the last of the summer sun,

p.s. are we on socials together? If not - let's connect on Instagram or LinkedIn, because that's where I'll be sharing delicious news about what's arriving for Samhain.

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Happening within Yin Rhythms

🌶️ 1:1 Sensual Somatic Coaching
I'm reopening my one to one work again for a selected number of women who've been desiring to dive into the power and intelligence of their body. Reawakening the lover within them that alchemises life by being herself rather than by creating a longer to-do list.
▸ Schedule an is-this-for-me call

🪭 Łono Shakti
Nasze Ciało jak i nasze Łono nieustannie się z nami komunikuje. Często jednak nie możemy rozpoznać Jej głosu. Przez bramy Twoich zmysłów - odkryj swój wewnętrzny raj. Znowu poczuć tę sensualność, tę rozkosz bycia sobą - w tym ciele, w tej fazie życia.
W intymnej grupie kobiet. W głębi jesieni.
▸ Poznaj szczegóły - zaczynamy 20 października Łono Shakti

🪭 Womb Shakti
Our body as our womb is constantly communicating with us. But most often we can not recognise her voice. Through the gates of your senses - to find your inner paradise. To feel again the sensuality, the delight of being yourself - in this body, in this phase of life.
▸ Check out the details - starting 21 October Womb Shakti

🎙️ YINtentions, Season II
Listen to YINtentions on Spotify - stories women were told not to tell.