The Diamond Heart Descends

A Retreat Story in Two Parts

In the manner of women who remember their wildness

“Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

PART ONE: Into the Wild Stillness

Days One Through Seven

Prelude: The Woman Who Chose the Dark Wood

I did not go into retreat to escape my life. I went because something in me—something ancient, something that knew the way even when I did not—insisted that I must descend. Into silence. Into stillness. Into that dark, rich forest where the wild things live and where transformation is not a gentle process but a necessary unmaking.

The apartment I chose sits at the edge of a wood in the Maritime winter. I brought with me the weight of eight years of grief held close like a stone against my chest—and beneath that, twenty-five years of battles fought largely alone. I brought my practice cushion, my shrine, my grandmother’s handmade quilt. And I brought the sacred depression I had carried for decades, the one rooted in the great wound of the absent mother.

I did not know what would find me there.

But something did.

The Stag at the Window: Gravity Lines and Sacred Messengers

On the first morning, before my eyes had adjusted to wakefulness, before I had reached for my glasses, I looked toward the window and saw him. A stag. Lying down on the ground just beyond my window, marked with unusual white patches on his fur. He was resting there as though he had been waiting.

I had seen deer from this vantage before, but never in the morning. Never this white marked stag. And never one who stayed—who seemed, impossibly, to be keeping vigil.

I lay very still, watching him through the blur of my uncorrected vision. Something about seeing him softened felt right, as though clear sight would have been too sharp for this kind of knowing. He was teaching me something already: that there are messages which arrive through the body before the mind can name them.

Years ago, in a vision journey, a stag had come to me and taught me about gravity lines—those invisible threads of connected-insight that allow safe, balanced passage through treacherous terrain. When we cannot see the path clearly, he had shown me, we can feel for these lines with our bodies. We can trust them. They will hold us.

Now here he was again, as if to say: You have entered the terrain. The gravity lines are here. Trust.

The Forest Encounter: Almost Touching

On the second day, I walked into the wood. The air was bitter cold—well below freezing—but I walked slowly, following a rough path. I noticed a fresh pile of deer droppings beside the path, and then further up another pile right on the path… like breadcrumbs left by some wild guide. I climbed until I came around a turn and suddenly found myself facing another stag. Different from the one at my window. No white markings. Standing in the path, looking directly at me.

I stopped. I took a step back—not from fear, but from respect. I honor your space, the step said. And then, softly, in a warm voice that surprised me with its tenderness, I spoke to him.

He did not run.

We stayed together for nearly twenty-five minutes. He grazed. I stood still, talking softly and warmly. He came slightly closer as he grazed. After around 20 minutes, he suddenly walked right toward me. I extended my bare hand in the freezing air, and he stretched his neck toward me. His neck was bobbing up and down, as he was pulled between curiosity and fear. We came within a foot of touching—close enough that I could see into his eyes and our souls connected.

In the old stories, such meetings are not accidents. They are initiations. The wild one approaches the one who has entered the forest with an open heart—not to flee, not to attack, but to witness. To recognize.

On the third morning, the white-marked stag returned to his place, lying outside my window. As if to say: Both of us are here. The one who meets you in the wild spaces and the one who keeps watch at your threshold. We have not abandoned you.

The Red Stone and the Mother Wound

I was not looking for a symbol. I was simply moving through my apartment, preparing for the day’s practice, when a stone on a low altar called to me. Deep red with white markings. It came from Cape Split—that beautiful, terrible place where I had walked with someone I loved before everything between us shattered.

The red spoke of blood. Of lineage. Of the mother wound.

My mother was alive when I was young, but she was not there. Not in the way a child needs a mother to be present. She was lost somewhere in the rigidness of her religion, her unprocessed trauma, in the absence of her own emotional body. And I grew up floating—unsubstantial, believing at the deepest level that I did not deserve to take up space, that connection would always be withheld from me.

This is what I have called my sacred depression. Not clinical. Not ordinary sadness. But a profound sense of disconnection that lived in my bones, in my cells, passed down through the red thread of the mother line.

When my beloved cat Ashe died years ago, I thought I would grieve her loss. Instead, the grief work led me deeper—to the mother I never truly had. And in that descent, a divine mother found me: Buddha Mother Locana, who whispered the teaching I have carried for a decade: Focus on caring for the over-exposed part of yourself. Everything else will fall into place.

Now, holding the red stone with its white markings, looking out at the white-marked stag, I understood: this retreat was calling me to the very root system of my suffering. Not to fix it. But to transform it into medicine.

Completing the Timelines: Eight Years and Twenty-Five

There is a particular kind of work I do with the thirteen-year-old part of myself—the one I call Andi. She easily deals with memories I cannot always face directly. She can attend to wounds I have buried. And during this retreat, she and I descended together through two great timelines of my life.

The first was eight years: beginning with my move from Toronto to Halifax—a transition marked by my grandmother’s death and a terrifying encounter with my alcoholic father. Then came the activism work that would nearly consume me, standing publicly against abuse in a spiritual community I had loved. A cracked rib during the beginning of a worldwide pandemic, when a mentorship I depended on broke down. The death of my biological father, estranged for decades, who was the only other person in my family who had ever done any healing. The twin flame relationship I had believed was destiny—moving across provinces for love, only to find myself parenting both a woman and her child, going into debt, getting sicker than I had been in years, and eventually fleeing after she turned from fawn to fury. Living in a hoarder’s house because I could not afford anything else. And finally, the apartment where toxic smoke invaded my home, where my body finally said enough, manifesting herniated discs and sciatica and sleepless nights—my chiropractor telling me that my shopping cart was full and my body was refusing to carry any more.

The second was twenty-five years: stretching back to when my brother died unexpectedly the same week I began graduate school, and a romantic partner who treated me like Cinderella—demanding my service even as I grieved. The years of corporate initiation at a massive company that taught me how institutions can crush a soul. The kundalini awakenings that opened spiritual powers I had never imagined, followed by a nervous breakdown when my teacher expelled me from his monastery. A dear friend attacked by a man in our spiritual community who then took her own life when the institution sealed everyone in silence rather than seek justice. Discovery after discovery of corruption in communities I had trusted. High-stakes coaching relationships with brilliant teachers whose foundations proved sick at the root. Life-threatening pneumonia that took me out of the game when I pushed too hard toward a dream built on sand. The death of my soul companion, Ashe, a cat I had lived with for nineteen years, who was herself a dakini. Twenty-five years of learning that I could survive what should have broken me—and sometimes did.

Together, Andi and I moved through these timelines. Not to relive them, but to explore what completion looks like. To say: This chapter is finished now. We survived. We can set it down.

And something did lift. Something shifted. As though the earth itself sighed with relief that I was finally willing to release what I had been carrying.

Soul Art and the Diamond Being: A Christmas Descent

On Christmas Day, I undertook a Soul Art journey to meet my Essence Spirit Guide.

Soul Art is a practice of profound inquiry: a guided meditation that leads you inward, then invites you to let your hands create what your conscious mind cannot yet name. Through paint, through color, through image, something deeper speaks. It is not about artistic skill. It is about allowing the soul to use your hands as its voice.

The journey took me to my galactic origin—to a crystalline being, a diamond consciousness that did not feel foreign but rather like a homecoming. This essence showed itself as clarity itself: the capacity to see truth directly, to cut through confusion, to perceive what lies beneath the surface of things.

The images that came through my hands spoke of purple hearts scarred by lightning, of sitting utterly still while chaos whirled around me, of a fencer whose precision emerged not from aggression but from perfect attention. They spoke of someone who has always known too much, seen too clearly—and has often paid the price for such seeing.

When I asked what my essence needed, the answer was direct: Crystal clear alignment.

And I felt something in me rebel against it. Because this diamond clarity—this gift I carry—has also been my greatest burden. I have fought against my own nature for so long, exhausted by the very capacity that makes me who I am. Perhaps the journey now is not to escape the diamond but to accept it. To stop struggling. To let myself be the brilliant, cutting, seeing thing I have always been.

The Expression Journey: The Rose with Thorns

On Boxing Day, I journeyed to meet my Expression Spirit Guide—the one who would show me how my essence might flower into the world.

What came through startled me. A voice—ancient, feminine, fierce—speaking of what my awakened feminine had been denied. Your feminine needed the wisdom milk of the feminine lineage, she said. This is what was lost. This is what you must reclaim.

As I painted, a rose emerged. Deep red, fully open, alive with feminine power. And surrounding it—carefully, deliberately—I painted thorns.

Years ago, a teacher I respected told me he preferred roses without thorns. I remembered his words as I painted each sharp point on the stem. I remembered how something in me recoiled at his preference. Because roses grow thorns for good reason. The beauty needs protection. The softness requires guardians.

In painting those thorns, I was reclaiming something he had wanted me to surrender: my right to boundaries. My right to say no. My right to be both beautiful and protected.

I noticed that the rose was attached to its stem in a precarious way—there was no pedicel, that little structure that connects flower to stem. It looked vulnerable. Easily knocked loose. And I understood: this was my task for the second week. To paint in what had been missing. To create the structure that would hold the feminine blossom in place.

But that was work for another day. For now, the rose was born—thorns and all. And it was mine.

The Sacred Pause: Seeds Beneath Snow

On the seventh day, the dakinis spoke clearly: Rest. Let what has been planted germinate. It needs stillness for that.

This is difficult advice for a woman who has built her life on action, on problem-solving, on the heroic push through impossible circumstances. To be told that the most important thing I could do was nothing—to let the seeds rest beneath the snow—felt almost unbearable.

But I had entered this retreat to learn. And so I rested. I wrapped myself in my grandmother’s quilt—that physical inheritance of the good feminine lineage. I watched the sunlight move across the snow outside. I let my body simply be.

Something was germinating. I could not see it yet. But I could feel it stirring beneath the surface, preparing to emerge.

The first week was complete. The descent had been made. Now it was time to see what would rise from the dark soil of that sacred work.

~ End of Part One ~

Part Two: “The Diamond Heart Rises”

Would you like to do your own Soul Art journey? Join me as I lead a community journey