Karin Wildheart

You have a wild-growing forest garden inside you. Never-ending greenery, sparkling lakes, birds and insects, mushrooms and wild animals. Berries and towering oaks. Tiny hopping toads and thickets of fragrant medicinals. You have an abundance of emotions, feelings, ideas, impulses. Memories, hopes, voices, desires, dreams. At times it can be overwhelming. What guidance have you been given to navigate this lush inner world?

All your life, people have been telling you to mow your anger short to not upset the neighbors, to pave over your sadness for convenience’s sake. To be happy and successful only in little contained bordered patches so no one has to feel jealous or threatened. Not to let your self-esteem grow too tall. To be endlessly vigilant about weeding out “sins” (you’re not even sure are bad). It’s been exhausting. So very much work for the meager payoff of looking just like everyone else when you’ve never taken the time to decide if you even like that look.

You long to know what your deepest wilderness would look like without all the maintenance. You’re secretly delighted when your abundant life force bursts up through cracks or overflows the garden beds. It feels so YOU to be furious at corporate greed and environmental destruction–even if it’s “impolite” to say so around your social circle of corporate employees who keep their air conditioner set in the 60s all summer and idle their SUVs without a thought. It feels so YOU to be honest about the watercolor art you’re so good at instead of modestly denying everyone’s compliments with “anyone could do it.”

Your grief and longing make you who you are, no matter who is uncomfortable. The things you’re amazing at make you who you are, no matter who is envious. 

What if you let your inner wilderness grow free? What if you’ve got healing herbs growing there, or greens bursting with far more nutrients than any grocery store? (Metaphorically, you do. I promise it.) You suspect it would be beautiful beyond measure to speak your truth even when it’s easier for others if you stay small and quiet and smiling. Yes, even though you’ve been told this is unacceptably arrogant and you’re not smarter or better-educated than the experts (as if you can’t decide for yourself who to consult, and why, and when, and get second opinions).

You know that wilderness is the only way to turn your raw emotions into fertile beauty: Throw an apple core into the woods and the woods reabsorbs it in weeks, turning it back into next-generation nutrients. Drop a banana peel on a sidewalk and it’s nothing but an eyesore for up to two years.

The problem isn’t that you have messy patterns/secrets/addictions in your life. We all do. Given air, tending and light, we tend to outgrow or at least integrate them. The problem is that our society allows us nowhere to put these things so they get sealed off with no oxygen and end up festering anaerobically (the most disgusting option of all!) 

When you spend your time only in buildings and on pavements, each inner death, each release, is a disgusting, embarrassing, naked problem instead of a meaningful part of the circle of life, food for rich soil. When you spend all your time in settings that insist upon proper decorum, your struggles can only be hidden away, never aired, never healed.

I’ll put it bluntly: when you worry about how you look, you create a life that only feels good skin-deep. To enjoy your life down to the bone, you must shift your focus to how you feel.

The world needs your medicine. We need your healing, because where you have healed, you can offer healing to others. We need your wild-growing, lush life force. Yours and mine and all of ours are what is missing when the systems of this planet feel soulless and shallow.

I have spent many years becoming a skilled navigator of inner terrain. It lights my soul on fire to walk with you through the sacred land of your forested history and show you the treasures within and how to navigate them.  How to compost the emotions you’re done with so they can seed your next generation of fruit. How to stop going in circles and track the little clues down the path to your dream life. The best way to journey with me is Rest Easy, a four-month 1:1 mentorship that goes deep and high and wide and will forever change your inner trajectory. 

Apply here if you are feeling the call of the inner wild 🦊