Exploring a radically new way of mothering both ourselves and others, and the impact of that on how we manifest in the world.
I have conversations with women doing this radical work - women who have
✺ opened my mind
✺ blown wide my heart
✺ pivoted how I see and navigate the world
Pull up a chair and join us.
The morning after the conversation I had with Easkey Britton about the power of WATER for the Element Sessions she emailed me to say that she had woken with a sense she wanted to share a little more with us all around the healing and holding power of water when it comes to grief and loss.
She offered to share with us a practical embodiment practice, a water ritual, as a way to honour our loss and express our grief, a way to be with our heartbreak, which has been immense for us as a species this last year and personally for each of us in many different ways.
And so a few days later we met again and recorded this beautiful offering. Easkey explores how our relationship with grief is closely associated with ebb, a sense of withdrawing inward, a feeling of emptiness, a sense of murkiness. How neither ebb nor grief are valued or allowed space in our society. How the process of grieving is one of making space for what wants to emerge.
She speaks about water as a holding element. As a memory keeper. How so many world myths around loss and death and grief involve water, how today this continues in rituals such as the paddle out ceremonies of surfers and other ocean going people.
She shares here a simple yet powerful way of creating one’s own water ritual, which can be supportive as a way of honouring a loved one, a loss within ourselves, a loss in our world and is also a way to enhance your connection with the water.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laylaomara.substack.com/subscribe
Beauty & Bone | The Element Sessions | Episode 4
vendredi 6 décembre 2024 • Durée 01:03:43
The Element Sessions Podcast | WATER with Dr Easkey Britton
I recorded this conversation with writer, big wave surfer & social ecologist Dr.Easkey Britton a number of weeks ago. I can honestly say that the time since I spoke with her has been different. I’ve engaged with the water around me in a different way, I’ve placed myself in and beside bodies of water more often, I’ve thought about my relationship to water, within myself and, rippling out, within the planet we call home, in a deeper, more present way. I am so excited to share this chat with you, and look forward to hearing what impact what we speak about has for you, too.
I was speaking to Easkey for the fourth episode of the Element Sessions and we were exploring the Element of Water, which is connected in Chinese Medicine with the season of Winter, into which we are stepping across the threshold into here in Ireland right now. Next Friday I’ll be sharing our Deep Dive into the Water Element, but I can’t think of a better place to begin feeling into this Element than with an hour spent listening to Easkey speak about it’s profound impact and the powers it holds.
Easkey Britton is a pioneering marine social scientist, surfer, writer, and ocean advocate with a PhD in Environment and Society. Her research explores the intricate relationships between humans and nature, focusing on the health and wellbeing benefits of engaging with water environments. Britton combines science, art, and activism to address social and environmental challenges.
Through her books, such as Ebb and Flow and Saltwater in the Blood, she uses storytelling to make scientific concepts more accessible. Her work empowers women, fosters cross-cultural connections, and advocates for environmental and social change, drawing on her deep connection to the ocean.
On this call Easkey shares :
𓇸 Her own remarkable, life long connection with bodies of water, from stepping onto a surfboard at age 4, to being named after a wave, to how her own life course has been profoundly influenced by her naming and connection to the water.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Mid-life Chat | Part 2
samedi 16 novembre 2024 • Durée 01:02:27
Hi friends,
{ words below are mostly penned by the wondrous wordsmith Lindsay Johnstone ! }We wanted to get this out to you ASAP so you can dig in over the weekend. This is the second part of our chat inspired by All Fours by Miranda July, which far more famous women than us implore you to read :
We talk about leaning in to the messiness of midlife; fear of what’s going on inside our bodies; our relationship to our sexual bodies and how midlife offers us an opportunity to (re)discover who we are and what we like. This post from Celeste Davis was mentioned more than once in the chat:
We dig into what it feels like to emerge from the oestrogen fug - what Dr. Susan Hardwick Smith calls the veil of oestrogen - and recognise that the mothering / caring part of us is evolving.
What can we / do we expect from grandmothers, too? The chat was on fire over maternal burnout and whether it breeds future generations of grandmothers who will be less available when there are (more) small people to take care of.
We talk about the conflicting information we’ve been told about testing for perimenopause and HRT and the complex landscape of women’s health generally, which can make it so hard to know what treatments to try to manage symptoms… Do we need to become our own doctor, too, as well as Jill-of-all-other-trades? One recommendation if you’re interested in going down a specific medical peri rabbit hole is The Menopause Brain by Dr. Louise Mosconi. And if you’re looking for a Substack to follow, writes The Vagenda. Over on Instagram, check out , and .
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Doors Closing on €20 membership : why I'm here & how I want this community to feel
samedi 9 novembre 2024 • Durée 05:37
Hello dear friends,
I’m sending this video by way of both introduction, and also as a way of telling you a little more about why I’m here on Substack, what my intentions for the beauty & bone community are and most importantly how I want this space to feel.
I’ve a special offer running until midnight tonight for my membership (GMT, Nov 9). The offer is for €20 a year for as long as you subscribe versus the usual €50. I will be putting my prices up next year (but you’ll still pay €20).
To get more of a feel for the membership, you can also check out my Membership Hub, but do come back for this offer, as it expires soon and I won’t run another at this price point again!
And for those of you who’ve watched the video - here is me an hour ago, SOAKED and filthy and happy as a gal can be!
Layla xx
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laylaomara.substack.com/subscribe
Beauty & Bone | The Element Sessions | Episode Three
vendredi 1 novembre 2024 • Durée 01:03:34
OK, let’s dive in to the second spiral of the Element Sessions, which is exploring
M E T A L
The Metal Element is connected to the season of Autumn, to a shedding, releasing, letting go. It is a deeply powerful time of the year. It was said in ancient China that the emperor would wait until Metal season to decide on which prisoners were to be release and which executed, because there was the greatest access to discernment and truth at this time. It is a a time of release, of return, of respect.
I wanted to begin this spiral by sharing a deep and wonderful conversation I had just yesterday with my dear friend and wisdom weaver Mari Kennedy. Mari is an Irish Celtic cyclical guide, a map maker and a global gatherer of women. Her passion is evolution, in particular of ‘women and our relationship to power and wisdom at this wild messy bewildering edge of evolution’.
Mari grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s in the West of Ireland at a time when most of us didn't question anything. She was the archetypal "high achieving good girl." In her late 30s, the Cailleach,the great Dark Feminine force in the Celtic tradition, upended her life. As Mari writes:
‘the Cailleach dragged me kicking and screaming onto the Path of Sovereignty, where she showed me that...I wasn’t in my bodyI didn’t have myselfI wasn't using my gifts. I was disconnected from nature I was playing small to stay secure...’
𓇸We talk in this conversation about how Mari climbed back into her body and started to weave a new way of life.
𓇸 We talk about our avoidance and fear of the darkness, and of how we can with tenderness begin to move towards it more.
𓇸 We talk about our relationship to failure and vulnerability, about how uncomfortable with not knowing, with messiness and disruption.
𓇸 We talk about the collective Samhain and death our planet is going through at the moment and how the Celtic Wheel can help us navigate these times.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
our mid-life chat! | recording
dimanche 20 octobre 2024 • Durée 01:01:02
Myself, Caro Giles, Lindsay Johnstone and Chloe George thoroughly enjoyed this thought-provoking chat, with a wonderful gathering of well over 30 of you, about how we are feeling at this wild time of mid-life.
We’d all read and adored Miranda July’s All Fours, and thought it would be a wonderful spring board from which to explore so many of the experiences we find ourselves having in our 40’s.
We spoke candidly about how we are feeling in our bodies now in our 40’s, what we are not ready to let go of, what we are grieving, what bothers us less, our motivations for taking care of ourselves now versus back in our twenties. We explored the idea of the male gaze, of how inescapable it feels almost despite ourselves …
We talked about being seen, about our fear of being invisible.
We talked about how hard it can be to navigate the transition between being a vibrant, sexual woman and the duties of domestic life and motherhood.
We talked about what awakenings we’ve had in our 40’s, and wondered whether there is more to come.
We didn’t get to speak enough about how the female body is seen, how this changes, or about anger and rage, or about HRT pros and cons. We didn’t talk enough about creativity or domesticity or what kind of older women we hope to become.
I’m fairly certain we’ll be doing more of these chats - they were fun, they were eye-opening, they felt helpful, they felt good to do and feedback from all of you seems to signal the same…. so watch this space! And do let us know in the comments below what you thought of our conversation, and what else you’d like to hear us discuss.
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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
HRT - on taking it & being cross about it
vendredi 11 octobre 2024 • Durée 14:47
I started taking HRT about two months ago. I was quite cross about starting to take it. I felt a little ashamed about it. A little bit like I’d failed. I’m also feeling remarkably, annoyingly, pretty great on it. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t piss me off quite a bit.
A voice recording of a post in which I explain why....
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Beauty & Bone | The Element Sessions | Episode Two
vendredi 20 septembre 2024 • Durée 58:59
Hi dear friends, Welcome to the second conversation in this series of slow seasonal explorations of the five elements : The Element Sessions.
Today, I’m sharing, for all subscribers, a glorious conversation I had with writer, mother, grower and holder Kerri ní Dochartaigh. (More on this below!)
Next Tuesday morning I’ll be holding a live workshop and journalling session focussing on the element of EARTH. I’m so looking forward to putting some faces to names and meeting some of you in person. If you are curious about the offering but not yet a paid subscriber, DM me and I’ll share access to this first session together as a taster gift of the year to come.
My wish for these sessions is they will provide us with an opportunity to explore, in all it’s messiness and confusion, what it means to be a human, living on the planet right now. I want to ask questions about how we can navigate this strange and tricky time we are living in together in new and radical, yet often very simple ways.
The framework for this exploration are the touchstones of each of the five elements of Earth, Metal, Water, Wood and Fire. I see these as jumping off points from which to explore the ideas above in a simple, real, manageable way.
I would like these sessions to be portals through which we can explore tenderly ideas around safety and gathering, grief and heartbreak, fear and longing, lust and joy, growth and anger.
I’d love for you to join me as these conversations and these explorations evolve and deepen.
Now! On to this week’s conversation… It has been a week of big realisations and tough truths for me. It has been a week of asking how, as I navigate so much loss, can I find ways to be held?It has been a week of really asking myself what is my relationship to the more than human world?Is there mothering and support offered by it? And if so, how, how, how, can I soften enough to let that in?
So many of these questions have arisen because of the conversation I had with that I am sharing today.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Beauty & Bone | The Element Sessions | Episode One
vendredi 13 septembre 2024 • Durée 42:50
I’m delighted to welcome you to The Element Sessions.
If you would like to follow along with this year long gentle exploration of the elements, please subscribe to my Substack beauty and bone.
I’m thinking of these slow, seasonal sessions as small pitstops in our year.
𖥸 Ways to pause, take a breath, take a look around.𖥸 See what is working for us, reflect on what is not.𖥸 Connect to different fundamental aspects of ourselves.𖥸 Be curious about what is challenging for us, absorb what has been good.𖥸 Be in community with other like-minded people.
During these sessions, I’m going to be talking to people from all walks of life about what each element means to them in their lives. But I wanted to begin this series and this year long journey with a conversation with Five Element Acupuncture master practitioner, author, podcaster and psychotherapist Gerad Kite. You can check out Gerad's website here, or follow him on Instagram here.
Gerad has been a mentor and teacher of mine for a number of years and I wanted to ask him to join us to give us a bird's eye overview of where the theory of the Five Elements comes from, why they're so fundamental to our lives, and how they can resource us and nourish us.
I found this to be an eye opening, at times perspective shifting and fascinating conversation.
In the couple of weeks since I had this conversation two things in particular have really stayed with me.
𖥸 Firstly Gerad talked about the Daoist philosophy of oneness and how important the recognition of the oneness of everything, in particular the oneness of humanity - is in Chinese medicine. The vibration of the Wood energy is what makes a tree, but is also the vibration that makes our livers, our skin, our nails. Not only that, he also points out that ‘your liver is my liver, but it's your liver because it differentiates as a unique manifestation within you. But the that creates your liver or your heart or kidneys is the same as mine. And that's why we, as human beings and our relationship with animals and nature is very close, and we are totally dependent on each other, because we are one thing.’ I've taken so much from this concept in recent weeks - gently shifting my perspective on how and who I am in the world!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
octopus womb
dimanche 24 mars 2024 • Durée 11:59
In April 2020, at the age of forty one, I had a hysterectomy. It had been a long time coming. I’d been told at age thirty, after I’d had two big operations to remove aggressive fibroids from in, on and around my uterus, that I would probably need to have my womb removed at some later stage. The surgeries I had back then were in many ways a stop-gap, a way of holding back time long enough for me to be able to try and conceive. Which in and of itself seemed like a long shot – post the two operations I had a 50 / 50 change of getting pregnant. Which was better than the 0% chance I had with the fibroids distorting my womb, but they still weren’t great odds. Plus, I was single.
But I managed it. I walked out of the doctor’s surgery with my prognosis that day and went to meet a scarlet-haired friend at a red-bricked French restaurant across the street from where I worked. Sitting at the bar with an American singer and an Australian base-player sat my future husband. The Australian would eventually marry B and I on an island in Croatia with our backs to the ocean and our feet dipping in the cool water of a swimming pool. My scarlet haired friend would wear a tight sleek bob and a long white dress. The American musician would wear his curly black hair wild in a halo around his kind face.
Layla O’Mara’s Beauty & Bone is a reader-supported publication. Writing these words takes time. I am deeply grateful to all paid subscribers for their support.
I managed to carry and birth three babies too, managed it by the skin of my teeth. Black and blue after the first one. On bedrest for two months with the second, my placenta stuck to my womb during delivery. On the third I bled from eighteen weeks until I delivered two months early having spent three months in hospital. But my womb and I did it. With luck, grit, determination, bull headedness, and a touch of miracles. But she was tired after it all, my womb. Tired and distorted and bulbous with the tumorous growths of fibroids returned. I was tired, too. And acutely sore. And I bled, my god did I bleed and bleed and bleed. It wasn’t much fun.
I went for multiple opinions from surgeons and women’s health experts and nutritionists and healers and you name it I’ve done it. Looking for a way out, a way around it, a secret cure. A fix. The final surgeon I went to see, the man who would eventually perform the operation, kept using the word ‘reasonable’ during my consultation. A hysterectomy would be a very reasonable choice. It would be very reasonable for me to have my womb removed. Which it was: I was in a state and nothing else had made a blind bit of difference to my condition. But somehow this doctors insistence on my reason, on how logical and sensible it was to make this choice, unsettled me. I didn’t feel ready in my body, even if I could justify it intellectually. Employing my reason felt like I was forcing my own hand, overriding something in myself. It was hard to explain.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
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𓇸 We talked about what it feels like to surf a 20 foot + wave, particularly as a woman, how she has learnt that there must be a dance between the masculine and feminine energies, of the lessons in surrender, letting go and opening that the waves have taught her. I loved how Easkey spoke about a ‘water mind’, or ‘blue mind’, that she has developed over a life time in the water.
𓇸 We spoke about thresholds, intertidal zones, ecotones and about our relationship with fear when it comes to water, as well as the importance, so often overlooked in our lives, as well as in what we see of surfing, of the ebb before the flow state arrives.
𓇸 Easkey spoke so powerfully about the connection between our own amniotic fluid and that of salt water, and of the sense of belonging and homecoming that water imbues in us. She spoke about the ways that water holds us, as well as the ways that our having a relationship with bodies of water help us to engage in a far more felt-sense way with the climate crises and other often hard to grapple with crises and issues.
And, oh my, we spoke about so much more. I’ll stop typing now and let you go and listen to this conversation, I feel so delighted I’m getting to share it with you all! Below you’ll find links to Easkey’s two beautiful books, her website and an upcoming event she has next year. Next week I’ll also be sharing a really profound gift that Easkey has offered to us all - a practical embodiment, a water ritual, as a way to honour our loss and express our grief, a way to be with our heartbreak, which, as she writes ‘… has been immense for us as a species this last year and personally for each of us different ways.’ Please do subscribe to receive this gift next week.
You can find out more about Easkey’s work On her website https://easkeybritton.comOn Instagram @easkeysurf You can find out more about her books hereAnd she is hosting a new retreat in March 2025! - find out more here.
For more on the Element Sessions, head to my page www.laylaomara.substack.com
It was such a powerful, truthful and moving conversation with a dear friend and a woman who I know will open your heart to a radically new way of being.
You can find Mari on Instagram @marikennedywisdom or at www.marikennedy.com.
This is the first part of the METAL spiral. Here’s what’s coming up for the remainder of the spiral :
M E T A L Element Sessions
𖥸 Friday 1 November : Podcast will land in your inboxes with wisdom weaver Mari Kennedy (free for all subscribers)
𖥸 Friday 8 November : Deep Dive written post into the M E T A L Element will land in your inboxes (free preview, then access to paid subscribers)
𖥸 Thursday 14 November : 10:30-11:30am GMT: M E T A L live call (Paid subscribers). You’ll receive a link to the Zoom the day before, recording available).
Energetically connected, I’m also offering this series of four gatherings towards the end of the year.
Chatting to some of you on the last Element Sessions call, I was struck by the value of simply committing to sit for an hour together and write, pause, think, create. I extend an invitation to you all to sit with me for 4 early mornings towards the end of the year and do just that. I’m picturing a womb-space, a dark, warm holding space for us all.
Details are
𖥸 6-7am GMT𖥸 Friday 29 Nov, 6 Dec, 13 Dec, 20 Dec𖥸 On Zoom, I’ll send the link the day before. Will not be recorded.𖥸 Free to all paid subscribers
Kerri is a writer, mother, holder and grower. She is the author of two beautiful books – Thin Places, which was awarded the Butler Literary Award and highly commended for the Wainwright prize for nature writing, and Cacophony of Bone which was longlisted for the Wainwright prize and was a Waterstones book of the year. She also writes regularly on her Substack newsletter Glimmers - a page dedicated to those sharp, bright moments of joy in our days and which meditates on why we need creativity, inspiration, and beauty; now more than ever. Kerri regularly runs OAK MOTHER - a free writing circle for mothers, MOSS MOTHER MOON - a women’s circle, as well as teaching and mentoring worldwide. Follow her here on Substack or on Instagram for updates on her offerings.
I asked Kerri to join me to discuss the EARTH element and what the idea of earth in all its forms has meant and means to her. I began our conversation together by sharing Kerri’s words from her essay titled Solas, Solace, which appears in the gorgeous collection of essays by Daunt Books In the Garden. Kerri writes:
I wish I’d known, long before now, that sowing is a way to grieve.As hands scatter seeds into earth beneath feet, they are really sculpting loss.With careful, repeated movements, the hands are moulding it into a thing like light on stone.
So we started here, with these perfect words, and with the word soil, and an hour of conversation flowed.
We talked about soil and safety and seeds, We talked about motherhood and mycelium,We talked about gardening and expectations and failure,We talked about outer space and time, We talked about broken bones and heartbreak,We talked about grace and grief.
I came away from it feeling like we had covered so much, but also that I could have asked her a thousand more questions and filled many more episodes.I’d love for you to take a listen and to let me know what it sparked in you?
A little more about The Element Sessions …If you are new to these sessions, you can read a little more about the structure of them here. You can also join me here for a deep dive slow deep dive in to E A R T H (ideas around Safety | Savour | Mothering | Gathering, including an audio version).
And you can listen to a fascinating conversation I had with five element acupuncture master practitioner Gerad Kitehere.
Still to come in this first spiral of EARTH ::Tuesday 24 September | Live call (recording available) | E A R T H - reflections on transitions, gathering, harvesting, gratitude & safety.10-11am UTC + 1:00 (paid subscribers, you can subscribe here, or DM or emails me for free access as a taster gift)
Friday 27 September | Lyndsay Kaldorfrom Story & Thread guest post | Notes from the garden I’m so delighted to share this post with you - Lyndsay writes so thoughtfully on how the plants and flowers in particular are speaking to her in each season, I always find I look at my own garden and surrounding anew having read her posts. Lyndsay also has a beautiful new membership offering called The Beauty Thread, which is well worth checking out, she is offering so much here.
𖥸 Gerad also talks about the value of paying attention to what you are uncomfortable with in any particular season and therefore element - because there lies clues to where you may hold an imbalance, and therefore also the clues to potential change or healing.
This season of Earth / Late Summer for me is always both the most delicious time of the year (the berries! the light! the blustery wind! the surprise sun! the light! the light!) but also brings up deep, fundamental challenges and discomforts for me - around being able to really absorb and accept goodness in my life and a constant yearning for and simultaneous rejection of any form of mothering, from myself or from others.
These challenges for me, all the time, but in this season in particular, are coping mechanisms I have put in place to protect myself from heartbreak, and, I see now, are ones I need to find ways to open myself up to.
So dive, in take a listen, and let me know what you think?
Here’s what I have lined up for the next 10 days of The Element Sessions. Everything is designed to be listened to and accessed at your own pace ::
𖥸 Tuesday 17 September | Deep-dive newsletter into the Earth Element, complete with journalling prompts. (paid subscribers only)
𖥸 Friday 20 September | Podcast conversation with mother, writer and grower Kerri ní Dochartaigh (free to all subscribers)
𖥸 Tuesday 24 September | Live call (recording available)10-11am UTC + 1:00 | E A R T H - reflections on transitions, mothering, harvesting, gratitude & safety (paid subscribers only).
𖥸 Friday 27 September | A wonderful surprise guest post - details to follow!
A few weeks after my ‘reasonable doctor’ consultation I began to have a strange sense of something on the tip of my tongue. I had the continual sense there was something there at the periphery of my vision that I kept missing, that kept slipping away, sidling out of view. This went on for a week, maybe two, until one morning, as I reached for a cup to pour my morning coffee I finally caught sight of what it was I had been nearly seeing. It wasn’t quite a vision, it more of a strange inner knowing. And what I knew in that moment was that my womb was an octopus. An amorphous, otherworldly, ungraspable creature of the dark and the deep. Which I realise sounds a little bit bonkers, but this realisation made complete and utter corporeal, somatic sense to me. It was one of those moments in life where suddenly everything aligns.
Ahhhhhhhhhh said my cells.
A few weeks previously I had watched a documentary about an octopus and the relationship this small common cephalopod formed with a free diver who visited her every day for a year. It was a beautiful film, which (spoiler alert!) concludes with the octopus becoming pregnant and, as is the natural cycle for these creatures, slowly disintegrates and degenerates as she tends to the thousands of eggs she has lain in the darkness of her den. Eventually she dies, and her now almost translucent body is carried away in the jaws of a shark, her tentacles trailing in the fish’s wake like a silk scarf fluttering in the breeze.
I had watched this film tucked up beside B in bed after the children had fallen asleep, the rain thrumming softly on the tin roof of our home. I’d watched it and enjoyed it and thought little more about it. But somehow, this film and these final scenes in particular had embedded themselves deep in my subconscious. Slowly, with gentle nudges, my brain offered up this deeply physical metaphor as a way for me to understand the choice I had to make.
My beginning to see my womb as an octopus helped me to understand that the space in which my womb existed was dark, murky, a velvet shadowland. I could drop all those ‘healing lights’ I’d been trying to beam into her cave. She was a creature of the deep. The octopus also helped me to see that whilst my womb had mended and held and contained and nurtured again and again, there is a moment, too when it is time to let go, to conclude.
A whole third of the book I’ve written explores this experience in more depth, so there is a lot to unpack. But what I have returned to this week in my reading and listening and writing is a journey into a deeper understanding of the brain that resulted from this experience. I was and continue to be fascinated by what went on in my consciousness to reveal such a profound, bodily, complete understanding. It felt numinous, it felt otherworldly, it felt like a visitation. That said, I didn’t quite believe that a dead octopus from a Netflix documentary had appeared to me in my kitchen on a rainy Tuesday morning with a message about my womb, no matter how much it felt that way.
A few months after the octopus-vision, I listened to a talk by parent educator and psychologist Steve Biddulph. He described an experience he had while grieving a pregnancy he and his wife had lost. He spoke about how he was unable to process the grief, even though, as a trained mental health professional, he ‘knew’ all about it. He described an experience he had one evening sitting out in a barn on his land. He picked up a guitar leaning against the wall and began to idly strum. The chords started to form a shape, create a pattern almost without his knowing; his fingers took on a life of their own. Gradually the chords began to sound familiar to him, a song he knew well for the last twenty years emerged. the words of this song spoke profoundly to his locked-in grief. He began to cry for the first time since the loss of his child months before. His mind, allowed to wander and strum, arrived at a song and lyrics that allowed his stuck emotions to begin to move. The way Biddulph described this experience was precisely how I experienced the octopus appear. This was something that felt both entirely created by my brain, it felt like she crawled out of my mind’s eye, and also one which felt more than, mystical, the octopus seemed also to swim towards me. And so I wrote to Biddulph to ask him to explain his experience a little more. I wanted, specifically, to know more about the neuroscience of it all, what might be happening in my brain. How it could overlap and overlay in this way. He replied to explain that he thought it was about how our right brain (in most people, sometimes it is reversed) does the big picture knowing, on a purely animal level. He wrote about how the wild creature part of us is actually very complex, multi-dimensional, and at ease with symbols, metaphors and all the things that don’t fit easily into logical sense (which of course is most of the important things in life).
On Biddulph’s recommendation, I researched the work of psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr Iain Mc Gilchrist who has written extensively on what he calls the ‘divided brain’. In his seminal book The Master and His Emissary Mc Gilchrist describes in remarkable detail the workings of the brain, outlining the necessary separation of the left and right hemispheres in almost all animals, right back to the Startlet Sea Anemone 700 million years ago. He asserts that it is not, as was mistakenly believed for a time in the late 1960’s and ‘70’s, that the two hemispheres of the brain do two different jobs, but rather that each hemisphere attends to what it is observing in an entirely different way. The left hemisphere is very literal, it takes everything very seriously, receiving information almost as if it were a computer. Its view is exclusive, analytic and fragmentary. It focuses on the ‘either/or’. The right hemisphere is much more in touch with our embodied being, with our emotions and with our physical self. Its view is inclusive, integrative. It is comfortable with ‘both/and’. It is at home with the and yet. Both hemispheres are vital to our functioning in the world, but it is Mc Gilchrist’s assertion that in a well-functioning brain, the right hemisphere should play the role of ‘the Master’, and the left hemisphere should act as ‘ the Emissary’, acting on and making manifest the right brains complex interpretation and understanding.
I needed a right hemisphere ‘octopus understanding’ of my surgery to help me inform and embed the more logical, left brain reasoning. In the end, I came to the same conclusion that the consultant had offered, that I should have a hysterectomy, but it was a full-bodied choice, it came from a deep inner understanding. One could argue that this made no practical difference to the end result – there was still a knife, still a cut, still an organ removed. But for me, there was a profound otherness to this operation (I had had six other operations on my womb prior to this, so I have some reference points). It meant that when I went in for the surgery – during Covid with all those added concerns and restrictions – I journeyed through it as a healing act, as a ritual of sorts. In the nights after the operation I slowly, tenderly walked the corridors of the old hospital, watching foxes slipping down alleyways, birds lifting the days from the dark with their song. I saw my womb leaving me like the octopus at the end of the film, disintegrating into the ocean, a silk scarf waving goodbye.
There is an enormous amount to unpack in Mc Gilchrist’s theory of the divided brain. Next week, in part two, I will explore his theory that Western society has become dangerously left-brain dominant, as well as thinking about the importance of how and where we place our attention.
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