HERSTORY

My work is not about fixing what is broken, it’s about remembering what was never lost. The work I do in Wholeness Mentoring, in The Atelier, in every conversation I hold with a woman is grounded in something deeper than a method or modality. It is rooted in a remembering, a returning.

This page and the work it represents has been deeply shaped by the teachings of Jane Hardwicke Collings. Her essay Herstory offers not only context but a framework, one that helps explain why so many of us feel something misaligned beneath the surface of everyday life. Her work does not give us something new. It gives us back something old, something we didn’t know we had lost. So let me begin by telling you a story.

It is not a history lesson, it’s not even really about the past, it’s a story that moves through generations of mothers, grandmothers, and the women before them and speaks not in facts, but in patterns. It explains why so many women, despite doing everything “right,” still feel that something essential has been left out.

You were not born separate though that’s the story many of us inherited. You were born into a lineage of women who were wise, and wild, and silenced. Women who once knew how to move in rhythm with the earth, who read the seasons in their bodies, who passed down songs instead of symptoms. That knowing was not lost because it failed, it was interrupted, distorted, replaced.

Over time, survival required a different kind of knowledge. So they passed down what helped them endure: how to hold it all together, how to be good, competent, grateful. You learned how to carry responsibility, how to manage others’ needs, how to keep going and perhaps, you also learned how to silence the signals from your own body, not out of failure, but because no one taught you how to listen.

But beneath the performance of resilience, something has remained intact. A thread, a rhythm, a kind of knowing that doesn’t shout it waits. You might notice it when you stop performing strength and let yourself be still, you might feel it stir in a forest, or just before sleep, or during a life threshold like birth, menopause, or grief. It doesn’t speak in words. It arrives as recognition, a quiet kind of clarity. Not a thought, but a return.

This page is for that part of you, the one who never left, the one who has been waiting at the edge of awareness, holding the thread of your story. Not the story you were handed, but the one you are choosing to write. Many women who find their way here have already done a lot. They’ve read the books, been to therapy, explored the frameworks. They understand the language of healing, but haven’t yet lived it through the body. Something hasn’t landed, something still loops.

That is not a failure. It is the beginning of remembering and from here, we begin again, not with diagnosis or instruction, but with context, with connection, because when we truly know Herstory, not just as an idea, but as something felt in the body, we begin to see clearly. What was passed down to us was never meant to harm, only to protect. Our mothers, our grandmothers, and their mothers before them did what they could with what they had, and what they had was often silence, fear, disconnection, and duty.

They shaped themselves to survive and so did we, but survival is not the same as wholeness and now, we stand in a new moment a threshold they may have longed for, but could not reach. We now have language, we have science, we have understanding. We know about the nervous system, about intergenerational trauma, about the effects of suppression on the body and soul, we are no longer blind and with that knowledge comes responsibility. Not to carry blame, but to break the loop, to soften the mother wound, to repair the sister wound, to stop the story of silence from writing itself again in the bodies of our daughters and the psyches of the women who come next.

We are not here to point fingers, we are here to become ancestors worth descending from and if Herstory tells us what happened, myth helps us understand how it lives inside us, in our instincts, our patterns, and the shape of our healing. What comes next is not a method, it is a mirror. Let us begin.

The Selkie - Returning To One’s Skin

There is an old story told in the salt wind places of the world, of a seal woman who once came ashore, shed her pelt, and was taken. A fisherman, seeing her dance on the rocks, stole the skin that tethered her to the sea and hid it away. Powerless to return, she became his wife, she bore his children, she cooked, she stayed but her eyes grew distant, her skin dry, her soul shrinking slowly, quietly, away from the land that held her and still she remembered. Years passed. One day, her hidden skin was discovered, and with it, the memory of who she truly was surged through her body like tidewater. She wrapped herself in that skin and returned to the ocean not to escape her life, but to reclaim herself from the forgetting.

This story lives in many forms across the Celtic and Nordic lands, and each time it is told, a woman somewhere recognises herself. The Selkie tale is not a fairy tale, it is an initiation. It names what happens when we give up our wild for safety, when the roles we inhabit mother, partner, carer, achiever, slowly calcify around us and we begin to forget our own salt and song. When we wake one day with the dull ache of knowing that something essential is missing, but not remembering what.

The skin is a metaphor, of course, for instinct, for freedom, for the creative, untamed, sovereign self that once knew what it felt like to belong to her own rhythm. It is the skin we shed to be loved, the skin we lose in service, the skin we forget under the weight of performance and praise, but the Selkie never truly forgets and neither do we. There is always a moment when the memory returns, when a woman hears the call again. Sometimes it comes as longing, sometimes as illness, sometimes as rage, sometimes in the form of silence too deep to ignore. In that moment, she does not need a map she needs a mirror. The Selkie reminds us that returning to ourselves is not betrayal, it is belonging. This is the story that sits beneath many of the women who arrive in Wholeness Mentoring. Women who have lived capably on land, but whose bones are starting to ache for the sea. Women who want their skin back.

La Loba - Remembering What Was Lost

There is an old story, told in many places, of a woman who lives on the edge of the world. She goes by many names, La Loba, La Huesera, The Bone Woman and she is said to walk the desert, gathering the bones of wolves. She keeps them hidden beneath her shawl, bones that others have forgotten, discarded, or declared beyond repair. When she has collected enough, she returns to her cave and lays the bones out beside the fire. Quietly, she begins to sing. Her voice is full of breath and memory and as she sings, the bones begin to stir, slowly, they knit themselves back together, sinew forming, fur returning, breath re-entering the body. The skeleton becomes a living wolf. And when the creature is fully whole, it rises and runs out into the night. Some say it becomes a laughing woman, some say it simply runs, either way, it is returned to its wildness.

This story is not a metaphor, a teaching, a reminder of what the feminine knows in her bones, that nothing essential is ever truly lost, only waiting to be remembered. La Loba is the keeper of what has been silenced, she gathers the scattered pieces of the self, the parts abandoned in order to be good,  acceptable, safe and she sings to restore. The song is truth spoken aloud, it is the naming of what was once buried: grief, instinct, joy, rage, desire. It is the act of saying what has long gone unsaid.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, who gave this story to so many in Women Who Run With the Wolves, describes it as “a resurrection story about what can go right for the soul.” Singing over the bones, she writes, is “saying on the breath the truth of one’s power and one’s need… breathing soul over the thing that is ailing or in need of restoration.” This is what the work of wholeness looks like. It’s not glamorous, it’s not fast, but it is deeply real and it begins with the willingness to go into the desert, to collect what’s been lost, and to stay with it long enough for life to return.

Women may come to this work unsure of what’s missing, only knowing that something in them feels far away. A creative impulse that went quiet, a truth that was swallowed, a part of themselves that hasn’t had breath in years. La Loba reminds us: the bones remain, even if the body has collapsed, even if the life has gone quiet, the raw material is still there. This is not self-help, it is self-repair, a different rhythm, adifferent knowing and it does not need to be done alone. The Atelier becomes a kind of cave, a space to lay out what has been carried and begin the slow work of song. Here, creativity is not decoration; it is restoration, women gather to be with what’s been lost and to help each other remember, bone by bone, word by word. This is the promise of La Loba: if we have the patience to return to the bones, if we are willing to speak what has long gone unspoken, then life will move again,  in a way that is whole.

Vasalisa and the Doll - The Intuition That Guides the Way

There is a Russian folktale, centuries old, about a girl named Vasalisa. Before her mother dies, she gives her a small wooden doll. “Keep her close,” she says, “and feed her when you are hungry, she will help you if you listen.”  And then she dies. Vasalisa grows up quiet and obedient in a house that turns cruel. Her stepmother and stepsisters give her endless chores and no kindness. The doll stays in her apron pocket, she doesn’t speak, but she listens.

One day, they send Vasalisa into the forest to fetch fire from Baba Yaga, the witch whose house stands on chicken legs, whose yard is fenced with skulls. It is a test meant to destroy her, but Vasalisa goes and whenever she loses her way, or fear creeps in, she reaches for the doll, she feeds her, she listens. The doll knows.

Baba Yaga gives her impossible tasks: sort seeds from dirt, sweep the floor until it shines, cook a feast with nothing. Each night, Vasalisa sets the tasks before the doll and by morning, they are done. At the end, Baba Yaga sends her home with a skull lantern full of fire. When Vasalisa returns, the fire consumes what was false and cruel. It does not touch her.

The Doll. A Thread to the Motherline. The doll is not just a charm, she is the voice of knowing passed down in love, the intuition that does not argue or explain, but whispers from within. She is not dramatic, not loud. But she is always precise. In the story, there are two inheritances. One from the stepmother, control, performance, erasure and one from the mother,  trust, guidance, inner ground. Vasalisa learns which to feed.

This myth reminds us that intuition is not a vague sense. It is memory in the body, a wisdom line that does not vanish when those we love are gone. It waits, it guides, it remembers and when we honour it, feed it, give it space, it leads us through.

The Handless Maiden - The Journey of Wounding and Regrowth

In this old European folktale, a young woman is betrayed not by a stranger, but by her own father. In exchange for wealth, he makes a deal with a dark force, sometimes named the Devil, sometimes unnamed and unknowingly offers what is behind his mill, which turns out to be his daughter. When the dark force comes to collect her, he cannot touch her because she is too pure. So the father is coerced into cutting off her hands.

With her hands gone, the very tools of agency, creation, and protection she cannot remain in her home. So she leaves. She walks alone into the forest, where she survives on grace and instinct. Eventually, she comes to a royal orchard and, unable to pick fruit, she leans her head to a pear hanging from a tree. The king sees her, hears her story, and marries her. He has silver hands made for her.

Time passes. She gives birth to a child, but while the king is away, messages are intercepted and twisted by the same shadow that once stole her father’s judgment. She is falsely accused and sent away again, this time with her baby. Back in the forest, she lives in exile. It is here, through the long silence of the woods and her own care for the child, that her real healing begins. Over time, her hands grow back, not the silver ones, but real, living flesh. She is no longer just a girl, but a woman who has survived betrayal, exile, and isolation and come through it with a deeper strength. In the end, she is found again by the king, restored not just to her position but to herself. The reunion matters, but the transformation is hers, she now carries both the wound and the wisdom.

This myth is a story of loss and return, of how a woman can lose the tools to shape her life, not through her own doing, but through the choices of others and still find her way back. Her hands, symbolic of her ability to create, act, and protect herself, are taken. Yet even with this deep wounding, she chooses exile over remaining in the place that harmed her. The story speaks to a kind of wounding many women know: handed down through family, through culture, through the quiet agreements that have kept them small or silent. The betrayal may not look like a bargain with the devil, but it lives in the same territory, the inheritance we didn’t ask for, but were given.

And yet, there is something powerful in the exile. Alone and away from the noise, in tending to what is hers (her child, her inner life), the maiden’s true healing begins. Her hands grow back, not the ones given to her by others, not the silver hands, beautiful but lifeless, but her own. Real, living, and strong. This is a story of regeneration, of what it means to return to oneself slowly, over time. Of not being rescued, but reclaimed. It reminds us that even the parts of us we thought were gone can return, not in the form they were, but in a fuller, deeper expression.

In the work of wholeness, this myth sits at the heart of it. It teaches us that while we may carry the consequences of what was done to us, those don’t define the end of our story. What matters is how we meet the long walk through the woods, and who we become on the other side.

The Return Is Yours

These stories of the Selkie, La Loba, Vasalisa, and the Handless Maiden are not just myths, they are maps. Each one traces a different arc through loss and return, silencing and voice, forgetting and remembering, and within them, we find ourselves. Not because every detail matches our lives, but because something in them rings true in our bones.

Each story holds a different shape of disconnection:
A woman who gives up her wild self for the comfort of others,
A woman who gathers what’s been discarded and breathes life into it,
A girl who learns to trust what she carries inside,
A woman who is wounded by what she inherited, and still chooses to heal.

What they share is not one path, but a pattern, a deeper rhythm of what it means to be a woman remembering herself. These are not tales for entertainment or nostalgia. Myth is not about gazing into the past for history’s sake, it is how the psyche speaks. Myth reveals the hidden structure of experience, the shape beneath our stories. When we hold it in our awareness, life begins to echo it back, patterns emerge, choices make sense, we see not just what is happening, but why. In this way, myth is not something we read, it’s something we live, and the story you are living now already carries the arc of return. You may not yet know where it begins or ends, you may still be in the part that feels lost, unsure, silenced, or dry. But the thread is already in your hand.

This is the space I hold. Not to rescue, not to rewrite, but to accompany, to reflect, to remember. To walk with you as you find the shape of your own myth, not borrowed, but deeply yours, not from books, but from the life you’ve lived, and the life you are choosing now. You may find that one of these stories lingers with you, that something in it stirs  not only because it’s ancient, but because it’s also yours. These are not just metaphors, they are maps of the psyche, they show us what was exiled, what was taken, and what must be retrieved if we are to become whole. They help us name the thresholds: the forgetting, the descent, the trial, the return and most of all, they remind us that we are not the first to walk this way and we will not be the last. But myth alone does not change a life, it can wake something, it can offer recognition but what comes next must be lived and that is where the real work begins.

This is the space I hold, not to interpret your story for you, but to walk with you as you begin to live it with intention. To move from seeing your place in the myth, to shaping what happens next. Not from outside you but from within. The myths show us the pattern, your life gives it form and the return to yourself, your wildness, your creativity, your quiet knowing is not a luxury, not an indulgence. It’s the thread that restores the world.

This is the work of wholeness, of reclamation, of remembering what was never truly lost. You are not beginning from nothing, you are beginning from here, from breath, from story, from the part of you that never forgot. If you feel the thread follow it, if something here rang true, if you feel a tug in your chest or a warmth behind the ribs, I invite you to begin, by mapping, gently, intentionally.

The Wholeness Mapping Session is a free, 50-minute space where we follow one thread a loop, a belief, a place you’re stuck  and begin to trace it back to its root. It is a space of reflection, of seeing, and of beginning again. Or, if you already know that the work you’re here for is deeper, if you feel ready to meet what’s been buried and make something real with it, then step into the Wholeness Mentoring container, or explore The Atelier, a sacred space for reclaiming the creative impulse at the heart of your becoming. You are not alone in this, you never were, the return has already begun.

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