Slowly, Toward The Source
Exploring the Mother Wound, Befriending Fear Live, and Our First 5Rhythms of 2026
This was a recent newsletter that several people asked to share, so I’ve added it here as a post. My newsletters are ongoing musings on the cycles of life, my offerings, and community, including Toronto-based gatherings. If you’d like to receive them, you’re welcome to sign up.
Last night, as I was writing down a wish for my year, I reflected on my word from last year.
Slowly.
This past year, I moved more slowly than I ever had before. Slower and more imperfect responses to emails and texts, trying to take on less, to promise less than I once would have promised, while learning how to run an effective business and still pour my attention and time into my kids, my life, my dance, and the many people and places I care about.
Much of the time, I feel deeply satiated with my life; it’s enough. Most mornings, I still wake up with deep gratitude for the healing (and ability to sleep again!) that has brought me here.
And still, I noticed the reaching, where I was mobilized, impatient or wanted more. Where I imagined I could give more or be more, and I felt the pain of timing that wasn’t available to me, what it stirred in my body, and the sting of disappointment, both my own and what I feared I might evoke in others, discovering that slowing down meant staying with that discomfort instead of moving away from it.
Over time, I began to see how familiar that reaching was. Through my own mother wound, I had learned early how to reach toward what was not available, and that reaching became my felt sense of love, a current I followed again and again, hoping it might finally lead somewhere that could hold me.
Eventually, I stopped reaching because it was too painful to reach toward people who couldn’t meet me, and I became fiercely self-sufficient, determined not to need another person for anything, without yet understanding how my wounding and beliefs were keeping me bound to the very pattern I was trying to escape. That self-abandonment became part of the perfect storm that led to my illness in 2020, when my system finally collapsed under the weight of carrying life alone.
I couldn’t yet see how avoidance, hyper-independence, and increasingly rigid boundaries were constricting my inner rivers of life, thinning the web of connection that was trying to hold me, and cutting me off from the larger flow I belonged to. I could only see through the eyes of the past, and from there, support and people looked like danger, as if life and connection were things I had to guard against rather than trust. Living and almost dying by this idea, this trauma response, that I would never be caught off guard and hurt by life/people again.
This year, five years into my own healing journey, something shifted. I let myself reach again, and want, and need, even when it hurt, even when I knew it was coming from a young self. Instead of bypassing the pain or trying to manage it from a distance, I moved with it and allowed it to lead me, following the undercurrents rather than forcing myself back onto familiar banks.
And slowly, through more pain than I would have chosen, it brought me back to the source. The descent into the depths of pain, heartbreak, and shame… was the portal.
On the other side of the pain, the source was (to my surprise) love. My unrelenting love, a love I had long stuffed away, especially my love for my mother. The original love of my life, the body I was made from.
Slowly, I was able to put my hand on my own back and allow myself to be overtaken by the intensity of that love and by the anguish of the reality I carried, the belief that it wasn’t safe to share it with her, and I began to see how I had devoted my life to loving challenging (but physically safer) people endlessly, as a way of staying connected to her while also keeping her far away. I was devoted to her and to myself because I wanted her love, and I wasn’t willing to stop trying to meet this deep, instinctual impulse.
When I saw this, I didn’t judge myself- actually, I loved myself more (thank you practices!). I saw the innocence, the devotion, and the good intention, and I understood that this was unfinished business asking to be felt. Understanding that touched me so deeply and so softly, like overripe petals falling from a flower, and there I was at the heart of it, just as I remember myself, a deep-feeling fool for love.
And this was the ground that led me into our current series on the mother wound…
Last week we gathered for Class 1 of Befriending the Mother Wound, and the recording is now available inside The Gathering Stream.
In our first session, we turned toward the mother we had and the mother we dreamed of, and explored the space between those realities through felt sense, through writing, simple movement, gesture, and breath, giving language to what lives in that in-between space and allowing the body to move what words alone cannot carry.
From there, we took an inward journey, beginning to build a relationship with an inner mother connected to a deeper wellspring, something that does not replace the personal mother, but can hold what she could not, offering steadiness and nourishment even when life is painful or complex.
In the next two classes, we will continue exploring the personal, ancestral, and archetypal layers of the mother wound, working with grief, boundaries, belonging, and the ways repair can begin internally even when there was no repair in the outer story, and if you feel called, you are very welcome to join and receive the full arc through the recordings and live sessions.
As we move into the coming weeks, I also want to share that Befriending Fear will return in a deeper, more spacious format, live, in The Gathering Stream Community.
This series is the map I walked myself, years of lived experience, learning, trial and error, certifications, and courses distilled into a simple, deeply resourced process that has supported thousands of people living with fear, anxiety, OCD, chronic illness, pain, and insomnia.
This year, the live series will unfold over twelve weeks with built-in integration breaks, and we’ll move together slowly and relationally with weekly teachings on Tuesdays, open mentoring and Q&A on Thursdays, practice circles, guest teachers, and space for side study groups to naturally form, with everything recorded and support offered at a pace that respects your nervous system and your life.
The series begins on January 20th, and in the weeks leading up, I encourage you to come into the community and begin preparing together, as I truly believe the Mother Wound work can be a meaningful and stabilizing foundation for this next phase.
I’m also very excited that our first online 5Rhythms movement practice of the year is coming up next Thursday, January 8th, at 12 pm Eastern, hosted by me and facilitated by Layah Jane. This class is open to anyone who has completed Module 1 of Befriending Embodied Movement, and it offers a powerful way to begin the year by moving together and remembering the body’s wisdom. This is the practice that continues to give me the roots and wings to fully inhabit my body and my life.
Before I close, I want to say thank you.
Thank you to my one-on-one clients, to those inside The Gathering Stream, to those who read these letters, take classes, or share my work with friends and communities. This work exists because of your trust and your willingness to walk with me, and I don’t take that lightly.
As this year opens, I also want to share my word for 2026.
Source.
For the past two years, I’ve been having recurring dreams about a heart in a river, sometimes in a local river, sometimes on the land of a friend, occasionally in the Amazon, with the details changing but the feeling remaining, a homecoming to source through darkness, courage, curiosity, and trust.
In late November, I had another dream where I was carrying a heart in my hands, and a grizzly bear was following me around the house. I was scared and calling for help until I realized no one was coming. In time, I realized that I didn’t need rescuing because the bear wasn’t harming me, and the danger I felt was an illusion my mind was feeding me.
Eventually, the bear and I went and sat together by the river, and after careful thought, I fed the bear the heart. I wept, knowing in the dream that nothing would ever be the same. That heart was my heart, which was the heart of the river, which was the heart of the world, the source of the song…the food for the hungry, wild one in all of us.
This year feels like an invitation to turn toward this inquiry again and again, asking where the true source of the pain lives beneath all the reaching, and where the true source of the healing waits, asking who and what the universal heart is that pulses through love, grief, land, body, and longing alike.
With the bear on one side and the river on the other, I feel resourced enough to keep exploring my own inner wilderness, and I hope you’ll join me in our/your explorations this year.
“I am not found in the river, nor in the ocean,
I am found in the meeting of the two.”
— Kabir
xo Simona
I live and work on the stolen lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishnabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat peoples- and now home to diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities. My ancestral lineage is primarily Irish and Scandinavian.
My work attempts to honour the lost ways of circular, multilayered knowledge, kinship, and connection with the web of life. Nervous system, somatic, movement, and mindfulness practices are all rooted in Indigenous wisdom. I strive to respect these traditions by living in a way that minimizes further harm and fosters belonging and liberation for all.