Claire's Journey
I spent most of my life operating from my mind only: I have always been very intellectual and, for a long time, relied solely on my rational brain to make decisions about my life.
Setting off
Though the bohemian in me wouldn’t let me live a boring life: I did the smart thing and studied at the world’s leading universities, but to sprinkle it with some adventure, I spread it throughout across different countries. In my last attempt to be a good, studious girl, I started law school in Paris, but soon realized I was living somebody else’s dream. I dropped out, fled Paris, and moved to China indefinitely.
I planned to get a degree from the country’s most prestigious institution, learn Mandarin to fluency, and land a cushy job with a fancy international organization.
The universe had a different plan.
In January 2020, after my first semester in Beijing, I packed my little carry-on and set off to trek the jungles of Indonesia for a few weeks. The rest is covid history:
I never made it back to Beijing and didn’t see my belongings for 26 months.
My journey of spiritual awakening coincided perfectly with my Covid journey, which, ironically, had me travel around the world. Unintentionally, I became a nomad and the course of my life was forever altered.
The night before I left Beijing, two things happened. First, I discovered a breathwork and meditation technique. I wasn’t a meditator, but the topic had recently gotten my attention. When I heard about this modality, I was so fascinated that I immediately sought to connect with the community. Someone reached out and invited me to a retreat in Bali.
I was a self-supporting student and going on retreats was not exactly in my budget. However, the retreat’s topic of releasing stuck emotions from the body piqued my interest, so I jumped on a call with the facilitator and shared that my resolution for the year that had just started was to learn how to control my emotions – they were too distracting!
She started laughing at me!
“Honey, you can’t control your emotions!“
I was annoyed! And intrigued.
At the retreat, I felt very challenged. I thought I didn’t have emotions! At a sharing circle halfway through, when everyone expressed how they felt, I said: “I think I still don’t know how to feel.”
The second thing that happened before I left Beijing was that I started messaging with a guy I had met earlier who, coincidentally, happened to be spending his days practicing another type of breathwork and meditation. He told me about a related experience he was going to join in my home country and we lamented the fact that I would be staying Asia for years to come and we would thus not be able to see each other. Nonetheless, we continued chatting throughout my trip.
I had a Human Design reading at the retreat and was advised to follow my excitement wherever it led me, no matter how irrational it may seem. I didn't know what to do when I was unable to return to covid-struck China, so I decided to give it a try and follow my highest excitement. I took a chance and flew across the world through 5 countries – only to never meet this guy!
And so, just before covid lockdowns hit the entire world, I found myself in my boring hometown in Europe, just where I was meant to be.
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The Journey
In lockdown, I dove deep into breathwork, personal development, meditation, yoga, ancient wisdom, trauma healing, the mind-body connection, energetics, vibration, and frequency.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears. Through podcasts, I found my future mentors who spoke about all these things. I was hooked; I may have listened to some 200 episodes in 4 months.
I wondered who I could become if I joined their coaching programs – which were completely out of my reach financially. At that point, I was a student ousted out of my dorm in China, squatting in a friend’s furniture-less flat for free on a mattress on the floor!
Eventually, I understood that if I wanted to drastically change my life for the better, I would need to make choices that would be drastically different from my previous modus operandi. So, I decided that I could afford it, jumped off a massive cliff into the unknown–and never looked back.
In 2020, as I binged on the podcast from my dad’s bed while he slept on the sofa for three months, the wisdom, integrity, and depth of my future mentors blew my mind with every word they spoke.
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In 2023, as I decided to start my own coaching business, after 3 years of healing, growing, learning how to feel, and finding my own voice, it was I who blew my own mind, as I realized I had become not only a coach within my former mentors' organization, but also their friend and equal.
The best part? I knew that was just the very beginning. I decided that I was ready to take the world. Where could I get in three more years?
There are no limits.
For me or for you. Where could you get in three years? Who could you become? What could you experience, feel, and do in the world?
There is only one way to find out – follow your excitement, take some radically different choices than you have until now, and jump off some metaphorical cliffs into the unknown, just like I did back then.
I’ll hold your hand, if you let me.
The Feminine
Those coaching programs transformed my life from the inside out. I was dedicated to my transformation. I dove into the darkest depths of my psyche. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.
It was not long until I realized that this program only, as broad and universal as it was, was not enough for me.
You see, I noticed that all my mentors, coaches, and role models until then had been men.
Soon I would understand that this spoke volumes about how I felt about the feminine: i.e., as nothing worth looking up to.
I stumbled upon a summit of female speakers and found myself feeling dismissive, irritated, perhaps even disgusted by these female entrepreneurs and thought leaders leaning into their power and confidently speaking about their womanhood, their bodies, and even their sexuality!
Luckily, at that point, I had learned enough to know that if I was feeling so triggered by something, it meant it was an area of life that most needed my attention!
I realized how much I had rejected my femininity, sensuality, sexuality, emotionality, and my body. I had rejected womanhood, and because a woman I was, I had rejected myself.
I didn’t just lean into the discomfort; I dove in headfirst! I pushed through intense feelings of discomfort and inappropriateness and signed up for coaching programs about feminine embodiment, pleasure, and eroticism. The fear and discomfort made me sick for days and had me shrink with a sense of shame and wrongness when I thought about what I was getting myself into.
Rupture to Rapture
The reclamation of the feminine is a process of rupture and rapture: you’ll burst out of your shell and as you allow yourself to step into your fullness, claim your space and your expression, and lean into softness and receptivity, you’ll discover that you are able to experience immense and intense pleasure.
For me, it’s been a long, gradual, and uncomfortable process of learning about emotions, the physical and psychological symptoms of emotions and old energy being stuck in the body, healthy ways of emotional expression, my body, the natural cycles, practices which move energy and reintroduce vitality throughout the body, tantra, the power of erotic energy, i.e. our life force and creativity, and so much more.
It is a painful process to lean into the depths of what has been forsaken by the patriarchy and the male-dominated religious, political, and justice systems.
It is hard to reclaim that which has been rejected by the entire society, including its women, who had been stripped of their power and became complacent, because they did not know any better.
The reclamation process involves deep grief, rage, sadness, empathy, love, ecstasy, and everything else in between.
It is not a journey for the faint of heart. But it yields delicious fruits. Will you dare embark on it?
Yin and Yang
The masculine and the feminine are two opposing principles, synonymous with yang and yin, respectively.
In a patriarchal world, we know all about the masculine: we are all too familiar with the hustle culture which tells us to do, do, do and be more productive, structured, rational, and strong. It tells us that giving is more valuable than receiving and that logic always overrides feeling. Masculine spirituality, reflected in mainstream religions, looks above towards the sky and worships the heights, the immaterial, the formless, the elusive, emptiness, stillness, silence or razor-sharp focus. In some institutionalized forms, it worships a petty man that judges us from above.
Except for the idea of a judgmental god, there is nothing wrong with any of the above. But there is nothing wrong with or anything less sacred about the opposites of these things either. I believe that true spirituality resides in bringing the ineffable heights explored in masculine spiritual practices into the depths of the physical body while embracing all of its messiness.
The feminine or yin principle is represented by Mother Earth down below, its rawness, the messy ever-changing character of the death and rebirth cycles of mother nature, physical form, the fullness and aliveness of life itself, the loudness of our emotions, and the all-and-everything always happening at the same time.
We have lived in a yang-dominated world for too long, lost balance, and run ourselves to overdrive. It’s time we learn to worship the feminine principle as well: we get to learn how to just be. It’s time to learn again how to rest, restore our energy, and allow our bodies to naturally heal themselves. It's time to remember as a society how to be more spontaneous, flexible, soft, in tune with our emotions, intuitive, compassionate, and loving. It’s time we stop believing that receiving is wrong or weak and that we always need to give our all, even if our cup is empty.
It’s time that we stop worshiping only what’s up above and direct our gaze back down: back to ourselves and our bodies and further down towards the earth, which is just as sacred as the mysterious immaterial emptiness above. As women especially, we are so intrinsically connected to the earth and natural cycles, which influence us on the daily.
Our planet needs a rebalancing. Tapping into feminine wisdom is beneficial both for female and male-bodied people. Just like us women have been benefiting from embodying yang energy, which allows us to structure our lives, initiate action, and stand strong, so can men benefit from learning how to embody more yin energy, which is essential for us to be able to relax and heal, receive creative intuitive ideas, open up to more blessings, and connect with others on a deep level.
Feminine Embodiment
While the masculine tends towards stillness and emptiness, the feminine is all about fullness and dynamism. The feminine path is one of embracing ourselves and embodiment, which can take different forms.
I have tried sitting still and patiently waiting for energy to process through and leave my body. It didn’t work for me so well. My body is very dynamic and more often than not, releasing stuck emotions and energies from my body requires shaking or trembling, moving in various ways, sighing, crying, stretching my muscles or making sounds.
It is so healthy to express ourselves and allow our body’s innate wisdom to take over and move energy in intuitive ways, which our rational brains could not think of! Have you ever seen footage of a gazelle which had just escaped a lion? It just shakes the experience off! In this way, we are able to liberate ourselves of unpleasant feelings or old energies so much faster!
For these reasons, the dynamic parts of my workshops focus on moving energy through and out of the body via breath, sound, and movement — which can include yoga, qi gong, dance, exercise, rolling on the ground, shaking or screaming into pillows!
I have various tools up my sleeve and will likely use my intuition to guide you through your experience. I mix up movement with energetic practices, quiet space holding, emotional alchemy, working with archetypal energies, frequency therapy, mindset work and coaching frameworks, linguistic programming, breathwork, tantric practices, various meditation styles, and guided visualizations to help my clients break away from what’s keeping them stuck and unwell.
I believe you too are meant for more:
Feel more. Love more! Live more!
Do you?
