Become
Fully Yours

I am French, grew up partly in Paris and partly in Lyon, and have lived in Amsterdam for twelve years. I am forty-one. I have a good life by most measures, and a quiet grief underneath it that I had gotten very skilled at managing rather than meeting.

Gaia was the root — slowing down enough to feel my own body, something I had been avoiding. Durga was the reckoning with my anger, which I had been softening into sadness for most of my adult life because sadness felt safer and more acceptable. Brigid cracked something open. Saraswati gave me back a creative self I thought I had left in my twenties. Lakshmi — abundance and receiving — was the most uncomfortable and the most necessary.

And then Shakti. The integration month. Where you take all five goddesses into a ceremony and feel how they have lived in you, changed you, left their mark. I did mine alone, early morning, candles lit, the recording playing softly. What came was not dramatic. It was quiet and very certain. This is who I am now.

I am not a fixed person at the end of this. I do not think that is the point. But I am a truer one. The difference between performing your life and inhabiting it — I did not have words for that before. Now I do. Now I can feel when I drift toward performance and come back.

The self-led option at twenty dollars was the only thing that made sense practically. A baby does not care about scheduled calls. I listened to Juanelle's recordings during night feeds and nap times, earphones in, daughter on my chest. Those quiet hours became some of the most sacred of the whole journey.

What I found was that this course worked alongside ordinary life rather than requiring me to step out of it. The grounding practices of Gaia — I did those in the garden with my daughter on a blanket beside me. The anger work of Durga I did in the car after drop-off. Brigid's creativity practices I wove into the time she napped.

Shakti — the final month, the integration — felt like a homecoming. The graduation ceremony where you speak each goddess's gifts back to yourself. I did mine quietly after my daughter was asleep, candles lit, and I wept in the best possible way. Not from grief. From recognition.

This journey did not require me to have more time or more money or a more convenient life. It asked me to find the goddess in the life I already had. That turned out to be exactly the right question.

I joined because my closest friend had done it the year before and something in her had visibly changed. Not in a performative, spiritual way — she was just calmer. More herself. More interesting in some way I could not quite name. That was enough to make me curious.

The first month I intellectualised everything. Gaia's grounding practices — I was mentally cross-referencing them with what I knew about the nervous system and cortisol regulation, which is true but was also a way of staying at arm's length. Juanelle's voice in the recordings was warm and specific and I appreciated that she never asked me to stop thinking. She just invited me to feel alongside the thinking.

What finally broke through was Brigid. Week ten or eleven — shadow work, specifically looking at what you have been protecting yourself from feeling. I sat with that question for a long time and what came up was grief. Old, specific, patient grief that I had been intellectualising for thirty years. I did not dissolve. I did not have a dramatic breakdown. I just finally let myself know it was there.

The circle was invaluable for this. Women I would never have chosen to put in a room together — different ages, different countries, different lives — holding space for something real. No performance. No neat resolution. Just honest witness.

By Shakti I was someone my twenty-year-old self would not have fully recognised and my fifty-year-old self would have found terrifying. I am more open, more emotionally present, more willing to not know things. That is an extraordinary gift.