Sacred Journey - A memoir of Loss, Love and Coming Home to Yourself is not just for the feminine wound it is also for the masculine wound. This book is not only for my mother Mary. This book is also for my father Mario. Two voices. Two silences. One book that honours and speaks for both. The twin mythologies, She died because the world would not let her speak her pain. He died because the world would not let him feel his. Two silences, two mythologies. Two parents and one orphaned girl.

While waiting for my book formatting to be completed, thought I'd share another snippet from my upcoming Sacred Journey A Memoir of Loss, Love and Coming Home to Yourself. A CHAPTER... Two Heritages Visiting Crete, Belonging to Sicily and Scotland, 2024 At the end of my decade of sacred journeying, the journey turned toward the places where my blood comes from. Not the sacred sites of other people's traditions. My own. As with most things in my life, Crete arrived through synchronicity. I was attending a retreat called: The Celebration of Being Woman being held in Crete. The retreat centre already had my name on the door. I arrived to find that the previous retreat had left the name Maria on the door of the room that would be mine. The universe is sometimes not subtle. On the first evening, the sun and the moon were in the same sky, the solar and the lunar, the masculine and the feminine, in perfect balance over the oldest goddess island in the Mediterranean. A friend had asked me about my heritage. I could speak at length about my father's side: the Cucinotta’s, Sicily, the volcanic island, the migration to Australia. But when she asked about my mother's family, she noticed how much I struggled. I had grown up with vagueness. A shrug. Her parents were from the UK somewhere. Nothing specific. No town. No story. No detail. Just a kind of fog where the maternal line should have been, which, when I think about it now, was the mother wound showing up in the most literal way possible. Even the geography of her had been lost. My friend put the few details I had into an ancestry programme. And within hours, a lineage I had never known materialised on a screen in front of me. My mother's father was from Lothian, Edinburgh. My maternal grandmother's family were from Ireland. Edinburgh. Ireland. Two homelands I had never been told were mine. The Goddess Culture of Crete What I did not fully understand before I arrived on Crete was that I was stepping onto what may be the oldest goddess-worshipping ground in Europe.

There is something to be said about working with people you really align with and I was so lucky to meet my soul brother Don Hajicek in Colorado, who on my Sacred Journey captured a lot of my growth over the years with his amazing photography. Even on a trip to Sydney was able to photograph me in my home town of Sydney. This was a day at The Rocks!

Welcome to Divine Feminine Alchemy. I have been building toward this space for a very long time. Through a decade of travelling to sacred sites across five continents. Through the writing of a book that took everything I had. Through years of sitting with women in coaching rooms and in circles and on sacred ground, holding space for the particular ache of growing up without the mirror you were supposed to have. And through the quieter work, the mornings on the South Coast with the escarpment behind me and the ocean before me, journalling, meditating, letting the words come, letting the healing continue to do what healing does when you give it time and space and the steady attention of a woman who has decided she is not passing the old story forward unhealed. Divine Feminine Alchemy is the home for all of it. This community is for you if: You carry the mother wound the particular ache of having needed a mirror that did not arrive in the way it was needed. You have been searching in books, in travel, in relationships, in your own body, for something you cannot quite name but can always feel. You are done with the old mythology, the story that told you to be good, be quiet, hold it together, and pass the grief forward without naming it. You are ready for the new mythology, the one that says your wound is your initiation, the body keeps the story, and the woman who heals becomes the medicine. Or you simply feel the hum. That quiet, persistent frequency beneath the surface of your ordinary life that says: there is more. There has always been more. And I am ready to find it. What you will find here: Teachings from my book Sacred Journey and my body of work, the mother wound, the father wound, the heroine’s journey, the Isis gathering framework, the descent and the rising, the new mythology of women. Guided meditations from the Sacred Journey meditation suite -nine meditations, each carrying its own medicine. Live conversations where I share what I am learning, what I am writing, what the journey is showing me now.

From my upcoming book, Sacred Journey A Memoir of Loss, Love and Coming Home to Yourself… A DJ Saved My Life from a Broken Heart On music, the dance floor, and the men who held me without asking anything in return. Years before the sacred journey travel decade began, before Boulder, Bali, the medicine drum, or any of the language I now use for what the body knows, I went through the end of my first marriage. I did not go to therapy. I did not sit in a room with a stranger and explain what had happened. I did not journal or meditate or do any of the things I would later build a career around teaching other women to do. I went dancing. I am telling this story here, in the second half of the book, among the medicines, because I did not understand what the dance floor was teaching me until much later. My mind would take decades to catch up with what my body learned in a single night at three in the morning. But the truth of it belongs here, alongside the drum and the flamenco and the gathering and the rising, because the dance floor was where I first discovered the thing I have built my entire practice around: The body is the site of healing. Not only the mind. The body. This is why every workshop I create, every retreat, every circle, every programme will have an element of dance. Not choreographed dance. Not dance-as-performance. The kind of dance that shakes you. That moves through you. That heals you. Love Maria x