Honey & Ash: A (Neurodivergent) Mother's Metamorphosis Through Fire, Hormones, and the Holy Collapse
Thresholds
Thank you, reader, for being here—for your heart, your time, and your attention. I am deeply grateful you are here. This blog is a chronicle of standing at the door of yet another threshold. Peeling a different kind of Skin.
My poetry anthology is close to completion. (Honey and Ash: Mothers' Alchemy of Burn and Bloom- soon on Amazon) which has been an incredible journey thus far, of birth, rebirth, death and transformation.
The Muse's Siege: Channeling the Divine Mother
This past year, the Muse—manifest as the archetypal Divine Mother—seized me with ferocity. Inner polarities imploded. It's worth noting it was also a time where perimenopause symptoms heightened.
My first profound awakening in 2019 shattered my identity, plunging me into a 1.5-year dark night of the soul followed by five years of integration. Listen to my story here.
Awakening is not a destination but an infinite spiral. This year, I channeled two manuscripts, birthed three communities, and liquefied time itself. Creativity struck like lightning—urgent, searing, incompatible with packed lunches and meetings. I took leave from work; life demanded it.
SHE ( The Goddess) swallowed me whole.
Poetry, for me, is the soul speaking through cracks—a future self unraveling the knots of now. As I read my poetry back, it is as if, as a wise sister said to me once, I am drinking and being drunk by my own medicine—a tonic of remembrance that makes me weep, become more curious, and wanting to capture all of the journey of being seized by the fire of creation/destruction and letting go of what was produced.
I wrote as if my keyboard were a lifeline. Poems arrived faster than I could name them, threading me to a self I feared dissolving. In this wildfire, duality collapsed: mother, mystic, and neurodivergent Creatrix fused. I was everywhere.
I would be washing dishes and given a title; then, all activity would cease to capture the inspiration. Words poured through me—Google Docs bloated with grief-libations for Gaza's dying children. It got too overwhelming at times. But I never asked for the seizing to stop. It couldn't anyway!
This past year was marked with a prolonged period of constant consecutive phases of deep Samadhi [a meditative state of oneness] and a series of deep heart awakenings/expansions.
Dissolving Duality: Grief, Gaza, and the Porous Heart
The collective agony of Gaza's children pierced me. Bathing my kids, I envisioned blood-soaked seas. Time and reality collapsed—I became porous, hearing the drumbeat of our collective heart. Grief and love merged into one raw pulse.
This porosity was not pathology but alchemy. Walking streets, I'd weep at flowers, the sky humming inside me. Ancestors gifted visions, prophetic dreams, and a dress seconds after I prayed, "I am ready." Read that story here.
I burnt in the fire of her creation this time. I wrote as if my keyboard were a lifeline, as if my life depended on it. Each poem became part of a seamless thread tethering me to a self I feared dissolving.
There was (and is) no gap anymore between mother, mystic, and neurodivergent Creatrix. I.was.everywhere. I expanded in these states of consciousness, not of my conscious doing or through hours of meditation. In my story, it has simply been emerging as a natural byproduct of the journey of Self-Realization. After a point of this surrender, the journey takes care of itself. YOU die and life takes the lead. She will keep asking: Will you Trust, now? And Now?
After a while on the path of our return, SHE (the Divine Mother / Tap) lets you hang, and become the question itself. No need for an answer just the ongoing unravelling into the mystery of life.
Gaza's Agony & Seed Splitting
I accessed planes of existence that have nourished hungry books in me. The acute agonizing grief of Gaza's dying children was an inevitable part of this expansion of the Heart and mind deeper into the stillness of reality. I refused to look away at what society would say would blind me. I became a wreck. A seed split open.
I would bathe my kids and I'd be given visions of children swimming in blood. Reality collapsed, time collapsed, and I was everywhere. The previously psychic skills that had emerged with my last deep dive only got heightened, refined, deepened, integrated, and seamlessly here. To this day.
How much MORE deepening, I'd often exhale.
HRT as Compromise & Concession
I took time off work as it meant that I had to allow for this space—and it was in THIS gap and honoring that my poetry book was conceived…SHE had to crack me open so I Birth me, because SHE knows how deeply I can self-abandon…
I'm now turning to HRT. I have 3 kids, and this was my way of compromising with the Goddess. After the channeling of SO much creativity - I came to a standstill. Ok, she said, you have travelled deep enough now it's time to integrate.
My energy, by default, is a surrendered heart and very expansive. I had to find a way to come down deeper into my body. It is not convenient for one to lose themselves in the world of creation whilst minding little mouths and hands.
HRT Initiation: Body & Rebellion
It's been a month or so since I began HRT. After some initial shock of body adjustment, my psyche feels like she wants to rebel. It has felt as if the Muse is being expelled from within me!
I'm now beginning to feel the shifts of this, and I long to capture the process for other women too. To question to inspire to contemplate together.
The Muse feels like she is slipping quietly, like a lover through the night. I want to gaze at her, tell her how much I love her, and thank her for the greatest inspiration and year of my life—for how deeply humbled I became with life.
So, I currently find myself at the entry of yet another threshold, sifting through the ashes of who I was before it. This might well feel like a betrayal but it has echo of an ancient story told and retold. Many times.
Jung in his red book says that the soul starves if fired to choose between order and chaos. It's as if HRT had exiled the madness from within me. The same madness that let me taste the liminal. On the other hand I'm rekindled of Clarissa Pinkole Estes words and the trap of romanticising our pain for poetry.
So in this threshold I'm called to crush other beliefs I fester such as that creativity's associated with chaos and that to feel stable or balanced equals to feel sterile. Yes, this is a big one that's dissolving before my eyes. I am grieving.
But perhaps HRT isn't silencing my soul but teaching her to write in a subtler language. Perhaps the task here now, is to decipher and decode the whispers in the calm.
Flow States & Neurodivergence
The initiation of hormone replacement therapy (HRT)—a cocktail of estrogen and progesterone—is indeed altering my biology, but it also feels like a deeper dissolving of the architecture of a self. Also perhaps solidifying me in different ways. Bringing me back a linear brain that can assist me to BUILD the structures and frameworks of the body of my work. My medicine.
I researched hormones, their impact on our physiology, and their correlation with the spiritual journey and the metamorphosis that comes from it. It's all I'm about. I guess the academic nerd in me hasn't died yet!! Will she ever? Also, gifted for a reason!
With Estrogen, the hippocampus—which is the curator of our memory—gets modulated. My ADHD "forgetfulness" revealed to me to be nothing else but an ACUTE invitation to dwell in the eternal now where all stories coexist. I see Estrogen as the feminine hormone, linking it with flow. Like an ancient Dionysian [ecstatic, transformative] libation pouring through me.
I have indeed been swimming in intense flow-like states. My dear friend Ailsa Parsons has written about this in her PhD amazing piece of work check it here.
This led me to question: Have I been producing too much estrogen? I'll never know. My scattered ADHD focus and attention felt chaotic at times, and yet in the thick of this crack, I retrieved so much rich material. It's like the cacophony of senses and my scattered brain and its forgetfulness was the very door to access this liminality. I always knew this AND on reflection, in her wise glory, she led me to create this Facebook community which reframes radically what neurodivergence is! Then SHE gifted me the acute experience of this very experience! Thanks, Mother! (you can find my community here if you are Neurodivergent and experiencing a spiritual awakening. KNOW your awakening is meant to be felt different!)
This wasn't pathology, my love, but true alchemy. She whispers.but I'll be honest.
I was always such an empathetic child an alchemist from birth. I kind of miss the "pain" my reality came with. The aching beauty of my entire humanness. It's like my heart, for a little bit, has gone back into her cage as if I experience and process the world behind a glass. ONLY now, with this contrasting experience I'm gifted with the vision of her full beauty her wisdom and Grace in all her brokenness/mending.
Progesterone's Paradox
Progesterone is associated with the male hormone. Its quieter counterpart thickens the myelin sheaths of neurons, accelerating the transfer of signals we might call intuition or gnosis [direct spiritual knowledge]. Together, they form a hormonal loom, weaving new neural pathways while unraveling old ones.
For the neurodivergent creator like me—especially one straddling autism's sensory kaleidoscope—this biochemical renovation can feel like losing a mother tongue. The "channeled" poetry arriving with ferocity and wildfire is now slowed down (I'm still uncovering this) by progesterone's GABAergic [calming neurotransmitter] effect, which mutes the hyper-associative states that fueled my art. Is this a good thing now? I can't decide.
So who was I before HRT and who am I becoming? I feel more distant, more kind of aloof. Am I more or less here? It truly alerts me to wonder how deeply we have disembodied from our bodies and how much we have forgotten the ritual of our own bodily rhythms. As women. As a collective feminine.
Holy Rage - and its fire
I RAGE at the patriarchal regime that seeks to pathologize women, give them pills, and medicate them. Oh yes! Now I see the WHYs. Because our Embodied Wisdom IS threatening to the current system. Only, as women, when we Consciously ENTER this threshold WE become the bridge makers, the disrupters from the outside in.
I'm not here to fight ANY system. This is NOT the calling the Divine Mother has tasked me. But taking HRT has only solidified in me what I've known conceptually—but now called to body even more fiercely. To keep standing on the dangerous land of my truth! I also want to shout out to Neurodivergent folk. Neurodivergent folk are so much deeper into the core of reality. I 100% believe this.
But I'm willing to experiment and play with how life wants to roll with me. So, I remain faithful that the HRT phase has its positives. If anything, it allowed me to hyperfocus well and execute the completion of my poetry book and SO much more writing. Ok - I'll take that.
Integration & Individuation: a different angle?
Creativity has always been here, but for the past couple of years and through the fire of the Great Mother in all her Glory, in her fierce loving embrace and sword-like telling of truth, I have been catapulted into depths and levels of creation I have at times struggled to keep up with. It has felt like being a lightning strike. This is shifting, and I won't hide my relief. It is becoming a slow root system. I am left kinda missing the fire through which the descent of poetry would surge. Writing and poetry still come but with less ferocity. Is that a bad or good thing now? I'm contemplating.
I burnt fully. Now, in my ashes, I'm called to fertilise the soil of a quieter becoming? Maybe less dramatic one? Perhaps. Is this what Jung referred to as individuation? The maturation of the Self (with a capital S'?).
On the other hand, Progesterone thickens neural pathways and muffles the sensory cacophony that my heart, mind, and body receive—the very noise that gave me access to my art. The looming, emerging creativity now has a different feel, as if it drips like amber sap. It is no longer like a hot wildfire but mycelium threading through decay underneath the soil—slower, softer—the wildfire becoming an inner hearth.
Surrender
I sense the deeper, richer timbre is growing beneath the surface. It feels like in this process, some remnants of ego wanted to grasp onto the identity of a "poet," including the poems I birthed, and I now see it crushing beneath my feet. What a cosmic joke. I am rooting in the knowing that the poems never belonged to me—like feathers I can give me permission to let them go into the world. And paradoxically, the more open I hold my palms, unclenched, the richer creativity sprouts, continuously to surprise me.
Albeit not so much now. I find this shift incredible really perplexing and not fully convenient.
Amrita & Grace
It is worth noting that the past year, in all of this aliveness of life, I have felt more of the flow of Amrita [nectar of spiritual awakening] down my throat—literally, the sweetness of life. I have received this with a deepening blessing and deepest humility.
In Tantric traditions, amrita—the nectar of spiritual awakening—is said to drip from the pineal gland, bathing the body in transcendent clarity. Grace always likes to send me tangible landmarks to anchor and map my journey. I am beyond humbled by her Wise Grace.
HRT & Sacred Rites
So as I am concluding I can't help ponder: How is HRT been a tool of perpetuating the disruption of Women's SACRED RITES of passage?! Do we then NEED more HRT, or could we also have MORE spaces for sacred circles that HONOR the sweats and the melting as the fire of creation, rising from our deepest cosmic womb?
I am not in any rush to take a position. I am currently experimenting with it and will be documenting my changes, senses, and journey for what it's worth. But my intuitive Gut-Led response is that we NEED the spaces for us Women to sweat, to shed, to be held, worshipped, sacralized.
I'm here to ripple this distilled wisdom out into the world as A Mother who walks the hard, rough, endless path of Embodying the Light of the Solar Heart.
The Afterglow- Poem
You thought this was a fire —
this writing became your ashes.
But here I am lying naked
On the bed of post-creation,
In the soft afterglow of every poem's last line,
a body of simmering words still warm, still whispering a humming vibration arising from the muse's thighs.
I. WAS. Seized.
She kept me hostage.
Crushed me to Nothing.
She kissed me dizzy—
Until I tongued the commas into place,
Igniting the raw nerve of each metaphor until I wept my eyes into oblivion.
My tears became her libation,
ink pouring and blurred screens Capturing the wordless the most ecstatic affair.
Love and grief became one.
But what I called merging was in fact my dissolution: her fingertips Played my heart In the music of a harp Echoing celestial sweetness.
Her breath like a wind Carried my words to some shore I will never own.
I can now know the beauty In the ache of rereading— A re-visit.
Every poem that left my nest is a funeral whispering: Burn brighter.
Leaning in, she whispers, with a fierce softness:
"Child, You grasped at my abyss In terror, awe, and raw ecstasy.
At times you thought you'd own me,
But your grip was a prayer.
I never loved you for your fists.
I craved the ways you shattered into a thousand ways.
So you learn the way of surrender."
These days, I swim in her aftertaste Of my ashes.
The liminal feels different: Quieter. Softer. My palms unclenching. Like fern unfurling.
The poems only blossom
The more I stop begging them to Stay Fake hostage.
This is freedom—
And Salvation.
Spiritual Transformation & Perimenopause Prompts
so beloved mother and woman sister , I provide some prompts for you to reflect I d love to hear of your experience and insights . Let’s keep rippling and revelling and rising together .
How might you reframe your perimenopause symptoms as messengers rather than enemies? What wisdom might your changing body be trying to share with you?
In what ways has perimenopause invited you to release old identities that no longer serve you?
How can you honor both the grief and the liberation that comes with this transition?
What ancient feminine wisdom are you now more connected to that was less accessible in your younger years?
In what ways might your changing hormones be heightening your intuition or spiritual awareness?
How can you establish sacred rituals that honor and nurture your body during this transition?
What boundaries do you now need to set to honor your energy levels and emotional needs?
How might this threshold crossing be preparing you to serve the world in new ways?
What are you being called to let go of during this season, and what new gifts are you being invited to cultivate
How can you find community with other women experiencing this transition in ways that nurture your spirit?
Further Resources
Books
The Awakened Brain by Dr. Lisa Miller
Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Esté
The Moon Cycle Handbook by Lucy H. Pearce
Scattered Minds by Dr. Gabor Maté
Articles
Mackie, F. (1997). "The Left Hand of the Goddess: The Silencing of Menopause as a Bodily Experience of Transition." In P. Komesaroff, P. Rothfield, & J. Daly (Eds.), Reinterpreting Menopause: Cultural and Philosophical Issues. Routledge.
Citations
Bayer, J., Rune, G., Schultz, H., Tobia, M. J., Mebes, I., Katzler, O., & Sommer, T. (2015). The effect of estrogen synthesis inhibition on hippocampal memory. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 56, 213-225. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2015.03.011
Singh, M., & Su, C. (2013). Progesterone and neuroprotection. Hormones and Behavior, 63(2), 284-290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2012.06.003
Schüle, C., Nothdurfter, C., & Rupprecht, R. (2014). The role of allopregnanolone in depression and anxiety. Progress in Neurobiology, 113, 79-87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2013.09.003
Facebook Link to Art Image
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MY OFFERINGS TO YOU
For more on my offerings and Alchemy Mother/ Women circles express your interest here and I’ll keep you updated on the next round of circle gathering , possibly starting in JUNE
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