What the internet is doing to our intuition...

Nov 2

Behind the scenes over here I am just as spiritual-earth-mama-priestess-artist as you might think. What you see is what you get.

But I still have some pop culture in me. ;)

Because I love tracking what’s happening in our collective cultural spaces — especially when it comes to the feminine, empowerment, beauty, and equality. Which can all veer a bit into pop culture territory.

I mean, I didn’t obsessively watch the Johnny Depp - Amber Heard trials…but I was horrified by the collective coverage that seemed so punitive toward the woman involved. And I felt pretty damn suspicious when everyone was suddenly hating on Blake Lively and not so much was being said about Justin Baldoni.

I’m not saying these women were perfect or faultless — but the coverage of them, and rage against them it created, was bizarre.

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about…omg I’m so jealous, lol. And it doesn’t matter — because the point I’m making goes way beyond pop culture…

So when I came across Celeste Davis’s fascinating exploration of the PR firm reportedly hired by both of these men to turn the court of public opinion against the women, I felt soooo validated.

But also horrified.

Public opinion can be shaped with astonishing efficiency. (Amber Heard has spoken publicly about the death threats she received.)

How? According to the reporting (thanks to Celeste for the for NYT excerpts these are pulled from), here are just a few of the services included in the PR packages:

Website creation, full reddit presence, and social account take downs
Social crisis team to engage with audiences, go back and forth with negative accounts, change narrative, and stay on track
Start “threads of theories”
“All of this will be untraceable”

This approach worked. Which is very concerning.

And if a PR machine can manufacture narratives around celebrities this effectively, what else are we being fed every day by systems designed to capture attention, shape emotion, and keep us clicking?

And don’t even get me started on AI slop…

Because we live online, we live largely disembodied. And when we are disembodied, we lose touch with our innate ways of knowing — our senses.

All the “clairs” are important — clairvoyance (sight), clairaudience (hearing), claircognizance (knowing)...

But those clairs can be more easily hijacked online, where they are the primary ways we’re engaging with content. Even our bodies can be flooded with biochemicals from all our online engagement that makes it more difficult to really know what’s true.

Scent is different.

Your nose knows what is true.

And, so far at least, we can’t smell the internet ;)

Sniffing out the True and Sacred

This is part of what makes scent such an invaluable ally for the times we live in.

Scent keeps us in our bodies when the world around us wants to knock us off balance.

It can ground us, open our awareness, sharpen our attention, stir memory, and bring us back into direct sensory experience. This matters because when we are actually inhabiting our bodies, we have access to more information than whatever is being handed to us through a screen.

It also does something strange and beautiful with time: A scent can pull you out of the relentless forward motion of linear time and drop you into a vivid present where memory, sensation, imagination, and possibility all exist together.

Which all makes scent a powerful way back to your own sensory intelligence — the part of you that can perceive, discern, create, and relate before the noise of the world tells you what you are supposed to think.

Here’s the thing about letting yourself get taken for a ride — whether by a PR company or some other force. The outcome is pretty much always disempowering.

If you watched these celebrity scandals unfold in real time, how did you feel? Did you pick up on the messages that beautiful women shouldn’t aim too high or they’ll be taken down? Or that no one likes a woman who complains about a successful, handsome (I guess?) man — so keep your damn mouth shut?

Stay with me here…this is going to sound out there but it’s true:

If you were anointing your heart with rose for compassion, your third eye with frankincense for clear seeing, your feet with vetiver for grounding…you would be creating a state of coherence that helps you come back into your body, your senses, and your own deep perception.

And you would become someone who is much more difficult to fool.

The oils are beautiful. They smell delightful. They can absolutely support ritual, meditation, healing, prayer, and all kinds of spiritual practice.

Yet the deeper practice is learning how to use scent to change your state of consciousness and the frequency of your body.

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If you’re feeling a big yes right now, keep reading. Because this way of relating to scent is what Sacred Aromatics Foundations is about.

This program is a six-week immersion into working with scent as an embodied spiritual practice — learning to attune your body, your space, and your creative vision to the frequencies you want to cultivate and the realities you want to call into being.

We will work with the plants through anointing, ritual, sensory practice, and direct experience so your relationship with scent becomes a lived, embodied practice.

I’ve been dreaming up this program for nearly a decade. The perfectionist in me kept waiting…but there’s no more time to wait right now. We have to share our gifts with each other now, in service of beauty during these metamorphic times.

Which is another piece of why this program wants to come through now — the plant spirits and sacred anointing practices we’ll explore are spiritual technologies for remembering, embodying, and expressing the gifts you are here to share.

Psst: Scent helps collapse linear time — something we’ll dive into during the course — so if you’re feeling that all too familiar dance between resistance and vision…the oils can remove linear blocks so you can bring your creations to life ;)

Learn More About SAF

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THE BOTS ARE HERE

One more update to the whole wild west of the internet:

After I’d already written this piece, I came across a pretty fascinating post on Instagram, and I am sorry to say I have no way of finding it again :( But, I think it’s worth mentioning here.

But also, like, this is an anecdote. Snopes would not approve.

The poster was testing out engagement on Lindsay Clancy trial — other strange and horrific bellwether of cultural conversations on women.

The poster’s hypothesis: any content shared about the trial was being met with army’s of bots intent on encouraging discord and division. To test this out, she created a reel that was basically a nonsense post filled with key words about the trial, feminism, and few other barely related but activating topics (abortion, vaccines…something like that and I’m sorry I don’t have perfect details!).

No human would have thought anything she said made sense, let alone contained any semblance of an opinion.

Yet the comments came rushing in. And just about all of them were talking about how women need to lose the right to vote and other such anti-women rhetoric.

And to be fair, it’s also likely the algorithm would push a keyword-stuffed reel to people who fight about those keywords, so a pile-on of very real misogynists who didn’t look beyond the surface is an equally plausible explanation. (And arguably not the more comforting option…)

Of course, my ever-questioning mind also asked if any of what I read in the Insta post was real at all! It’s crazy-making.

So I dug into this phenomenon a bit more:

It turns out fellow Substacker Meghann Cuniff, a legal journalist who covered all five weeks of the trial, noticed the same thing. She writes how more than any other case she's covered, the online discourse about the Clancy trial was full of anonymous accounts programmed to repeat talking points, and that some of the conspiratorial accusations around prominent trials come from malicious actors in adversarial countries trying to influence domestic relations.

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We Need Heart Medicine

All of this — the PR firms, the potential malicious bot engagement, the disembodied internet that hijacks our minds and nervous systems — have the collective impact of severing us from our hearts.

Our hearts are home to compassion and love and willingness to take other perspectives, as questions, and see the human being in any situation.

And they are home to our deepest inner truths, our ability to create a field of coherence — literally heart coherence — that helps us live in alignment with our divine blueprints.

Luckily, we have the heart medicine we need — and rose is one of my favorite allies for the heart. I shared a ritual with rose you can do right now in this recent post. And if you want to join in a sacred circle, a real community, to anoint with rose to heal our hearts and return to embodied, intuitive knowing, remember that our October ceremony will feature rose as our ally :)

Join Our October Ritual with Rose