The Making of Mature Eros

From Rupture to Rapture

Sometimes it takes a seismic shamanic shake up to blossom into our full mature potential. This was certainly the case for me two years ago when at 57, I experienced the most brutal year of my life and journeyed deep into the underworld like never before. Broken and on my knees, face down in the dirt - howling and covered in messy tears and snot, it wasn’t pretty that’s for sure.

All familiar relationships, structures, places and community died a dramatic death and turned to ashes around my feet. All that I held dear burnt to the ground in a terrifying blaze that shook me to my core and stripped me to the bone.

This was the end of my 35 year marriage to a man I loved and thought I was going to grow old with. Intimacy had been dropping away for over five years and we’d grown distant yet remained friends and tried hard to repair with couples therapy, Tantra workshops and mediation - but nothing seemed to be working.

At the same time after an amazing 20 year adventure living in the wilds of South Africa, it was time to come back to the UK.

As we were packing up, my husband's big reveal was that none of the attempts to find our way back to each other were really working because he wasn’t really ‘in it’ and hadn’t been in love with me for years.

As painful and devastating as that was to hear, my overriding feeling was one of enormous relief that I could let go of the trying to fix and mend a marriage that was irretrievably over. I gave it my best shot that’s for sure.

It was time to set each other free with as much grace and compassion as possible, and although we were going through a huge transition in moving countries, it was just one more thing to throw in the pot and deal with.

We had run a successful photography and videography business shooting content for Getty Images for 20 years so I realised I really was going to have to put my big girl pants on. I had to start from scratch not only in life but in making a living too - a daunting prospect when kissing retirement age right?

Beginning a new life in a town that I’d never even visited - chosen with my witchy instincts - was brave but I trusted my immaculate inner compass (also affectionately known as my pussyometer! More of that later…) It always serves me well and is the thing that has supported me to jump into the abyss of not knowing and land firmly into amazing new adventures and opportunities throughout my life - this was just another one of those epic leaps of faith!

These have included leaving a successful career as fashion editor at Marie Claire magazine aged 28 to take a one year sabbatical traveling around Central and South America and leaving my job as Senior Fashion Editor at Elle magazine aged 35 and six weeks pregnant - so no maternity leave for me - but the stress of the job was something I didn’t want to experience whilst pregnant. Of course, the most courageous one was uprooting my family with a three year old child to leave the high life of London to move to South Africa without knowing a soul.

I first went to Cape Town as a freelance stylist in 2002 to do a job for Clark’s shoes. I was quite reticent about going thinking ‘Hmmmmm….I’m not going to like it here, everyone will be really racist and the history of apartheid does not sit well with me…’

On arrival, I was overwhelmingly seduced by the magnificent landscape and weather - I couldn’t believe you could have this really hip city surrounded by beaches and mountains! The people I met were warm, friendly and fun - it busted a few of the myths and ideas I held about this complex, multi cultural country.

Within a few days I called my then husband and said ‘Pack your bags, we’re moving to Cape Town!’ He was up for it and said afterwards that he trusted my instincts as although I’d travelled the world I’d never come back from anywhere saying I wanted to live there.

The crew on the job patted me on the back and said ‘There, there - everyone feels this way when they first visit Cape Town, you’ll get over it.’

But one day we drove into a place called Noordhoek an hour outside the city that has a seven km white sand beach overlooked by a majestic mountain and I had an epiphany - ‘This is my spiritual home, this is where I need to be.’ This coming from someone who had done nothing more spiritual than a couple of yoga classes in her life! But the voice and feeling absolutely shook me to my core and that was it.

I stuck a series of photos I’d taken of this epic beach along my kitchen cupboards back in London to remind me of where we were going when the going got tough. They shored me up when the incredulous voices of friends and family were ringing in my ears - ‘Moving to South Africa at this time when both your careers are flying in London? Are you COMPLETELY bonkers?!’

Yes, thankfully we were! A year after that first visit, we had bought a plot of land next to that beach to build our dream home. We had sold up and packed all our worldly goods into a container and moved across the world. BOOM!

South Africa re-wilded me. Communing in pristine nature, swimming in the Atlantic Ocean every day, walking those ancient mountains and being with the majesty of it all cracked my heart and soul wide open to receive and feel more of life than ever before. I arrived as a stylish London fashion editor and art director, kicked off my Prada heels and spent the next 20 years barefoot, feral, without a scrap of make up, integrating into the local hippy surfing community with our kids at a Steiner Forest school, and living on an off grid farm in exquisite nature growing our own veg and shitting in a bucket compost toilet!

It also grew me up in so many ways - it turned me inside out as I now had the space and time away from busy London life to start my inner journey of healing from childhood trauma and violence. My father was a bipolar alcoholic who took out his anger on his children who had ’stolen’ his wife (AKA caretaker/nanny) away from him. We were punished daily for this transgression and my mum’s coping mechanism was to pretend it wasn’t really happening and that everything was tickety-boo.

Hence it took birthing my first child at 35 to start to understand the enormity of the impact this had had on my heart, body and soul. A heroine’s journey of note followed as I descended into the underworld of five years of serious depression as I lifted the lid on it all. As the sun shone and the beautiful flowers blossomed all around me, I withered and hid under the duvet. My husband was like a deer in headlights - what the fuck had happened to his strong, vibrant, capable, intelligent and all doing, all singing, all dancing wife?

It was terrifying AND the biggest gift of my life as I sat in the fire and did the work. I started to understand that I couldn’t talk the trauma away, it was trapped in my body. This led me to embodiment work and Tantra.

I found an incredible teacher, Shakti Malan then took a brave leap and went on a six day women’s tantra retreat in the wilds of the Karoo out of sheer desperation

I arrived scared shitless, defensive and weary but left transformed, vibrant and floating on a bliss cloud. I had a huge cathartic process that involved me shaking off old trauma in Shakti's arms for over an hour, crawling outside on all fours naked, roaring the rage I’d kept inside for decades.

I woke the next day feeling spacious, clear and able to feel sensations again after five years of shutdown. I felt more alive than ever before - It was a miracle! I came home and my young kids and all the dogs were all over me mesmerised by this new energy and aliveness! Thus began my wild ride with tantra, conscious dance, plant medicine, an exquisite awakening, a heart opening journey and a blossoming into the embodied, mature badass I am today.

I love that the French translation of courage is ‘Rage du Coeur’ - rage of the heart. Looking back, I see that it is my raging heart full of passion and bravery and the ability to keep cracking it open and breaking it over and over again that has built my capacity to feel and receive all of life. As the late great Leonard Cohen said in ‘Anthem’ - 'There's a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in’.

For me this is the beauty of Tantric practice as well - it teaches one how to welcome it all, feel it all and express it all - Tantra welcomes ALL feelings - the good, the bad, the mad, the sad and the ugly. It doesn’t exclude or push anything away. The deep shadow work that is involved in Tantric practice is transformational because it invites the body to welcome, feel and integrate shadow parts and what are normally labelled difficult or unwelcome feelings, like rage, jealousy, lust and hatred.

In Tantra all is woven into body, heart and soul and alchemised into gold by giving full permission to feel everything - including our sexuality which is not welcome in most other spiritual practices. Tantra recognises our humanity and sexual life force as essential to creating a vibrant full spectrum life of agony to ecstasy. It increases our capacity to hold more of ourselves and more of life and keeps growing exponentially with regular practice.

Tantric practices continue to serve me well especially with the other big growth spurt that happened in my life in South Africa. (A deeply Tantric country of messy polar opposites!) On arriving, we realised that we could not live a comfortable beautiful life when so many weren’t. Action not avoidance was needed. South Africa has a pioneering frontier feel about it and this offers the opportunity to harvest gold in many forms - a sense of potentiality, edginess and a wildness of landscape and humanity that for me brought incredible aliveness of spirit.

During lockdown I could not sit and do online yoga while my neighbours in the local informal settlement of 4,500 people already had empty cupboards and empty stomachs. I set up an initiative called Feed our Valley joining forces with other local leaders and legends from neighbouring marginalised communities recognising the very real plight of their people. I supported the local settlement to set up three soup kitchens with teams of female volunteers from the community cooking each day. I fundraised, ordered and delivered the food and we were producing 3,000 meals 6 days a week for almost a year. It nearly killed me!

I thought it would only be for a couple of months but of course post lockdown was more brutal for the community as there were no jobs left to go back to. The system is very fragile in that many people of colour mostly rely on white people to employ them, and there is practically no government support and no welfare state. Sadly, a lot of white privileged South Africans do not play nicely and share nicely and as lockdown hit they dropped their domestic workers and gardeners without any compensation or support.

Of course, Feed our Valley was a crisis response and I realised it was not sustainable, but from this steep learning curve I birthed a Non Profit Company - www.growourvalley.org.This supports women to become entrepreneurial and set up their own micro businesses to empower them to become independent. It provides stipends to buy resources like sewing machines to make clothes and products, pots and pans to cook and sell food in the local community and set up laundry and cleaning services. I’m proud to say it is thriving to this day and has supported hundreds of women not only to set up small businesses to support themselves and their families (There are many women who are solo parenting in South African marginalised communities) Grow our Valley also includes monthly meetings for women including Gender Based Violence awareness workshops, business skills, self-care and wellness and bi-annual retreats where women sit in circle and share their stories and tears. They live only a mile from the sea and are able - sometimes for the first time in their lives - to sit and watch a sunset.

So fast forward to the next growth spurt into my mature badass self which was the shamanic death of EVERY FUCKING THING in 2023.

This seemingly catastrophic and deeply challenging time of radical change and death has actually been the greatest gift of my life.

By surrendering and releasing everything I held dear and letting it all crash and burn, I am now able to have a rebirth in my 60th year and rise like the Phoenix in the flames to live my best life EVER.

The first six months back in the UK can only be described as CARNAGE. Moving to a new town where I knew no one, holding my 17 year old son in some serious mental health issues and psychosis as he struggled with the transition to a new country. He was like a plant that has been ripped out of nourishing familiar soil and hurled into a barren desert. He wasn’t sleeping - therefore I wasn’t sleeping - we were both frazzled beyond belief AND I was trying to settle, make a new home alone, start a new life and career….phew….I hit Christmas on my knees with terrible cystitis (not due to too much sex sadly!) wanting to hide under the duvet again.

Luckily my plugged-in self had whispered ‘book a tantra retreat over new year’ while my mind was shouting ‘are you fucking mad?! You need to book an Airbnb alone and wallow with Netflix, Bailey’s and choccies. Luckily I now follow my heart and pussyometer so off I went into the deep once more!

I had been mostly sexually frozen for the last seven years of my marriage due to a big healing process after a body memory of being sexually abused by my father aged around 10. I started to realise on this journey with tantra that I’d never felt safe to be fully sexual in my body due to this early sexual trauma. I had always struggled to orgasm and although I had a very happy, loving and fulfilling marriage with a kind and beautiful man, I always knew I was not experiencing my full sexuality.

My tantra experiences thus far had been in women-only spaces and I now realised my next blossoming into my erotic fullness could only happen in safe mixed spaces in order to heal my deep seated fear and dislike of the masculine that resided deep in my body and psyche.

At this safe and beautifully held retreat last new year, I experienced a huge kundalini awakening where my whole body and sexuality thawed out. I literally defrosted and experienced waves of pleasure moving through my body like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I was like ‘Oh my fucking God - this is what all the fuss is about!’

I came home literally on FIRE - more energy, vibrancy, creativity and eros thrumming through my body at 58 than ever - it was like rocket fuel for life!

Last spring, I launched a new women’s photography business and spent the summer networking and pollinating at small festivals, retreats and workshops. It was the ‘Summer of Love!’ I met incredible people, danced my arse off, had some wild and sexy experiences and more fun than I’ve ever had in my life. For me it was erotic innocence at its best - this new awakening of Eros in my body was exhilarating, wild, tender and exciting and yet I didn’t feel compelled to go on a big fuck fest - that was not my way.

Instead, I had lots of fun going to Tantric retreats and Temples where my inner child and Temple Priestess had the best play dates EVER! This medicine grew my confidence as a newly fledged mature single woman.

The powerful Eros continued to pulse through my body and gifted me so much. I felt SO alive and sensual and in flow. The more I believed in the magic that was unfolding and embodied it, the more I magnetised incredible people and opportunities into my life. Less than a year after moving to Frome, I had a solid tribe of beautiful friends that felt like my new soul family.

A new connection with another tantric priestess at a festival led to my first trip to Egypt last October to co-create a women’s retreat of erotic awakening supported by the goddess Isis. What a wild, delicious and juicy adventure it was - to be in deep devotion to the goddess in the Isis Temple!

Isis literally stripped me to the bone and I received a huge download about who I am, what I belong to and what my new soul purpose was.

I had been called more into holding space for women as a facilitator after 10 years as an emotional support person and learning many rich teachings along the way. It had more juice and flow than the photography business so I followed the golden thread.

I came home from Egypt and spent two days scribbling furiously and received the message that my next chapter in life was to create a business called ‘Mature Eros’ which would support women age 40+ to cultivate more pleasure in their bodies to navigate Menopause with ease. BOOM!!

I literally sailed through menopause and realised I had all the tools and knowledge of how to share the potential of a more easeful journey with my 15 years of embodiment practices, tantra and deep self-enquiry. So six months of composting and creating and I'm launching Mature Eros soon!

I also deeply believe menopause is a powerful rite of passage - not an inconvenient condition to be fixed or shut down.

In my lived experience, it can be a potent portal into the most vibrant chapter of our lives if navigated with care, compassion, a truth or bust bravery and a deep dive into the underworld and out again.

We are the generation of women who wanted it all, got it all, then had to DO IT ALL so no wonder we often hit peri-menopause like a brick wall of WTAF-ness - our adrenals are fried and our bodies flooded with the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol creates inflammation in the body, brain fog, weight gain, lack of libido - all the symptoms of menopause right?! My new programme cultivates all the feel-good hormones like oxytocin, dopamine and endorphins that counteract the effects of cortisol, soothe the nervous system and expand the body and heart into pleasure.

I believe a mature woman in her embodied pleasure, with fierce boundaries, open heart and a soft power presence that comes from the back body - IS THE FUCKING REVOLUTION the world is yearning for!

I’m now dedicating the rest of my life to supporting women into female leadership through their embodied pleasure - a turned on, tuned in woman is INVINCIBLE and the ripples around her create harmony, right relations and restore natural lore.

Yes a woman’s sexual life force really IS that powerful - why do you think we have been shut down, persecuted and killed for it for so many millennia?

Patriarchy has fucked us all over whatever gender you are - it’s now time for Pleasure Activism (Thank you Sheroe Adrienne Maree Brown for trailblazing this in the epic book ‘Pleasure Activism’).

We are living in extraordinary times of huge change and seeming chaos where all the old patriarchal systems are crumbling - and boy are the old school ‘powers that be’ fighting hard and pushing back to maintain control!

But those of us who want meaningful systemic change need to do it from the inside out - we have very little control of changing what’s going on ‘out there’ BUT we do have control over our own bodies and how we respond to the outer chaos with love not fear. What I do know to be true is that when we prioritise our own pleasure and open our hearts to feel it all, we build our capacity to hold ourselves, our families, communities and more of life as it is with LOVE. I believe that pleasure activism is the way to do this - let’s join forces and awaken mass mature eros!

www.mature-eros.com

@mature.eros