You are invited.

About a year ago now, as I was preparing to lead this same retreat in Egypt, I came back from the desert a bit heart tattered. I was sitting at the precipice of the end of my fertility. By that time I had been sitting there for a while. I had inside of me a growing ambivalence. I was no longer obsessively compelled to have a baby, but I was also not entirely free of the grips of the captivating desire to make life inside my body. I was sand drunk from the time I’d just spent in the desert. And I’d just summoned a genie (also known as a magnetic man) on her curves toward which I moved recklessly under the influence of my own internal intoxication.

I knew I needed more sobriety (emotionally speaking—I’ve been external substance-free for many years). I also knew that I needed some help closing the chapter of my fertility and all that it had meant to me and all that it meant to me that it was closing.

Where exactly does on go to metamorph into the Crone, to bury the mother that you are... or worse...that you have been longing to be but have not become? Where would I take the ache in my womb or the sense of failure at being one who teaches women to pursue their desires but had never realized this one of my own. (Yes, truly, I know that desire is not to be measured in literal attainment—but this is what the brain does when it is reeling).

As the saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And so she did. From the very next room. In the cozy boarding house for witches where I was staying in an old neighborhood in Cairo.

Enter Rah. Womb healer. Indigenous shaman from South Africa. Water keeper. All around magical being. I had met her briefly in the kitchen before I went into the desert, while looking for herbal tea. Now, I looked at her full square and said—"I need your help to close my womb." I didn’t know exactly what that meant and she didn’t really ask. We made a time to “do it” between our busy teaching and prepping schedules. I got undressed. She set up a pot to steam my yoni, and we went to work.

She set the space and a pace with her drum. I journeyed into the waiting arms of my own ancestors and came out of that moment having seen and experienced exponential healing but also with the golden phrase “it is an honor to close a line”.

I had known for many years that I’d ben deep in the work of healing my lineage. Particularly my matrilineal line. But, before this moment, I’d had no idea that my *not* having children was a part of that healing. I’d sat with the hard patterns of self-abandonment turned inward to become anger and disease that taken both my mother and my grandmother with the same diagnosis. I’d watched their brilliance taken on the non-threatening confines of teaching and educational administration. I inherited many things from my lineage of teachers, but I also birthed an entirely novel  commitment to stay with myself no matter what--even when that meant leaving jobs and even industries. While I knew they were the right choices, I’d always also thought they were part of the instability that had doomed my own maternal aspirations.

But now I could see that that self-repossession, the ways I declined to martyr myself for my yet unborn, the stubborn moments that I insisted it did not have to be an either/or…these were the healing. This was the work. And no further women would have to be born in my line to digest the self-abandonment of ages.

I did not fail my line. I finished the work. And oh! What a mighty reframe it was. What a freedom to not live as one insufficient to the task of motherhood but as one who valiantly took on another necessary task.

Since this moment of revelation, I am more available to myself. More available to the dreams that are brewing or deepening in this transitional perimenopausal window. I have more lightness in my mind, more focus on what’s now and what’s next. I’ve closed a chapter of grief that let’s me truly look forward to whatever might be next. To grandmotherhood from unexpected places. To planetary motherhood. To stewardship.

By the time I had my clothes back on and a glass of warm tea in my hands, I knew the next retreat would follow Rah and this powerful work to her homeland. That’s how Womb. Water. Wisdom was born. And how I know beyond a shadow of a doubt how powerful and lifechanging it will be.

You may be reading this thinking that you can’t imagine your life without your kids. Or that you’re still very much looking forward to rendezvousing with your future children. Or that you’ve always known you didn’t want kids. It’s not about the particular path. Each path we pursue is the right path. It’s about the integration of our womb stories (our creative epicenters). It’s about our deep and essential connection to our matrilineage…to THE matrilineage…and to the Mother Mind - the core feminine creative knowledge that breathes us all in every moment of our lives—that lies at the heart of it all.

We are all mothers and daughters, connected to the heart of being, right back to the very beginning of time.

I invite you to join me on an unparalleled journey into the heart of humanity’s motherland…into the Mother Mind…and into a rebirth into your own deepest power. This fall in Capetown, South Africa.

It is certainly not a journey for everyone. But it can be for you if you are called.

Welcome to the threshold of a whole new kind of Surrendered Leadership.

Kianga

September 2025

Tarragona, Spain