Back to the future

The mystical path to reality and a sovereign life

Jul 23, 2026

If you don’t actively choose your dreams, you forfeit the destined life you are meant to live.

My pet peeve is people going on about their problems without doing anything about it. I don’t (choose to) have capacity for someone playing the blame game. While I do have much compassion and patience for the subconscious pattern of self-sabotage. Which is why I write on mythopoetic alchemy, personal development and facilitation within the spiritual scene, and reclaiming responsibility when it comes to actively choosing our dreams as a roadmap to fulfil our destiny.

If you don’t actively choose your dreams, you forfeit the destined life you are meant to live.

This is not only a hill I’ll die on but also the belief I tend to every day and a core value every one of my students and readers and ceremony participants have or learn to develop. Because if transformation and self-ownership, purpose and actively living your calling (instead of living in the idea and dreaming stage without integrating it into your mundane life) are not something you truly want, you will either get triggered by my work or simply not get anything out of it. As I can’t heal or change you, only you can. But I know from my own experiences and a decade within teaching work that once you decide you are not only responsible for your destiny but also able to co-create your life, my work will land in the most powerful way.

I will help you to discern between your conditioning, your wants and needs, your calling versus your dependency on external validation, and your intuition and deep-rooted belonging to source wisdom and divine nature versus your voice of fear, ego and identity attachment.

Over the years I had to unravel the balance between surrender and control.

Self-responsibility and conscious action are crucial yet can quickly end up in control: trying to predict an outcome, prevent risks, control oneself through endless healing or others in order to deflect from one’s own emotional experience.

And surrender can become a way to spiritually bypass the reality you are meant to embrace and has you avoid making tricky decisions that you fear the consequences of. You notice this when people rely on “flow” only when things are easy but the actual flow arrives after facing the challenging times and devote to discipline.

Control vs surrender to me really is the differentiation between fate and destiny, faith and belief. I go into it in detail here, so you can examine these dynamics in your own life.

I personally nearly died from a mystery disease when I was 13 and lived with medication for a decade after, having developed a deeply philosophical and aware mind but a numb connection to my body, to the degree that I never thought I would be able to “listen” to it. Outright doubting any of my internal signs and putting my trust and life direction completely into the hands of professionals, authority figures and (fortunately also) life and its possibility. Because there was still one thing intact and that was a strong sense of courage and heart-led living, something that was always with me but most likely enhanced through my second chance in life.

There was no part of me that wanted to bypass the human experience, I didn’t close my heart off and was not interested in escaping through substances. When I eventually was able to engage in plant ceremonies, I would always intentionally partake in the experiences in order to bring me deeper into life, closer to my internal truth and to help me see blind spots in my thinking and behaviour that had me avoid my responsibility or ways to live my life.

But because of my open heart and a belonging wound that is rooted even in ancestral trauma and possible past lives, I developed an anxious attached dynamic in relationship, constantly seeking love and external safety and acknowledgement. Instead of asking what I truly wanted I excused my lack of boundaries and avoidance of rejection with a dedication to compromises, finding only good in any man instead of acknowledging incompatibilities. Because I’d rather be with someone than alone.

This to me now (a mother of so far two, with an incredible partner who is the best thing that ever happened to me and a relationship that only blossomed because I had to face my strongest fears and did what I never dared before, but that’s a story for another post) is a sign of initiation into true leadership. Because if you are anxiously attached or have been, your default is to think about others, love others, bend your life around others. This, of course, is as much of an unhealthy long-term dynamic as it is to be anxiously avoidant, but once you have mastered your awareness and shifted your default to return to yourself and tend to community from that space rather than from a space of running away from yourself, and face the fears of exile and rejection and can hold yourself through it, you will never lose the ability of still thinking about and even for others. You simply stop acting on it and put the responsibility back to those that should wield it in the first place. When you reclaim your sovereignty and remember that you are the one you have been looking for, you will inevitably reflect that back and pass on the torch. This is the sacred leadership I practise and train facilitators and ceremonialists in. The wolf pack leader who walks behind to ensure everyone is arriving together, rather than an ego-driven need for performance and displaying dominance to portray power and defend one’s position.

I am an initiated and public priestess of Avalon, studied in a lineage of Celtic scholarship and something I call sovereignty-faith, a faith in the goddess of life, creation and mythopoetic meaning-making that constantly reflects your own choices and self-ownership back to us instead of dictating the exact steps, because they are unique to every person, context and life circumstance. What my path of Avalon gives me is core values and guidelines that inform my everyday reality. Healing, Death and Rebirth, the constant cycle of life, is not only honoured but practised, ritualised and made visible even if our contemporary society tries everything to neglect or distort them. Just as healing has become outsourced to institutions and professionals who claim authority over our bodies, or death is kept equally feared and suppressed. So too is rebirth, by the lack of initiation rites and threshold crossings.

Avalon also provides me with the solution, which, simple as it is, will still vary in degrees of ease and challenge. It is reciprocity and respect, conflict resolution, magic and learning, and restoring the sacred through joy and courageous quests.

So as fantastical and performative as it might sound to name oneself a priestess, I am here to remind you that this awe coupled with cringe at claiming the term stems from millennia of suppression of feminine leadership and of women in oracular, prophetic and politically negotiating positions.

Our first impression is that of the intangible and mystical and the unmeasurable qualities of ceremonies and magic rituals, but truly being a priestess is being a bridge between the sacred and mundane, and that can have a different expression for each priestess. Mine is educating, training and helping people find meaning and belonging in their life by integrating the spiritual lessons and insights and visions from their heart into the way they show up in their life, relate to their family and community and resolve conflict within and without, for a world we no longer feel the need to dissociate or escape from but truly thrive in.

I studied the Arthurian myths before they became the foundation of my spiritual lineage and re-membrance of my indigenous Western roots. Yes, we have those! As much as we are descended from the colonisers and witch hunters and are children of the patriarchy and capitalism, we also have an inheritance of indigenous spirituality and the well maidens and humans living in harmony with the otherworld.

In the recent decades the term witch was reclaimed and a lot of work surfaced around the witch wound, a term coined by Kimberley Jones - a very important part of our journey as it helped us understand why we are often shying away from our innate gifts and feel a deep calling to the sacred, the mystery and magic. But if it is not embedded into also acknowledging the internalised dynamic of thousands of years of suppression and domination we will still run into the same patterns and lead our life through a conditioned way of thinking and being.

And whilst the identification with the witches as victims and light workers as heroes is glamourised in spiritual circles, it still lives within us in a compartmentalised dynamic of splitting ourselves off from our wholeness. Because through idealising, we ended up hiding the more shameful parts of ourselves or our conflicting ancestry and cultural conditioning. Whilst descending further and further into a self-help spiral and digging ourselves a subconscious grave that has us loop further away from our power instead of rooting into it.

This shows up in the spiritual scene as bypassing responsibility, performing rituals in order to feel special or claiming titles to prove worth. It still keeps us in looking for external recognition and the need to be seen as “more evolved” all the while we are sold endless healing and being forever “in process”. Aesthetic spirituality, curated altars, borrowed prayers all missing the point of the true return to Self and one’s essence. Rituals and ceremonies are a foundation for more connection not a nice wellness add on. But because they have been treated like that, more and more people abandon the practices that initially brought them so much joy and opened the portal to their calling.

A big contributing factor is that people are trained in modalities that leave out the de-conditioning work and faith and sovereignty work. So modalities simply become yet another thing to do instead of the transformative practices they are. When we just offer a ceremony or breathwork session (or whatever practice) without integrating the teachings and help people realise the responsibility they have to actively change their life after or between sessions, we end up with a perpetual cycle.

Which looks a bit like everyone wafting around a sage stick, feeling super spiritual and open minded (and maybe a bit more in tune with energy) but still work in the job that has them burn out, stay in relationships that keep their attachment wounds open, and having new language for their problems without working on a solution and new way forward.

The surface changes but underlying dynamics and patterns are still the same. Parties get exchanged for ecstatic dances and girl’s night out for women’s circle but it doesn’t change the world if we don’t address the foundation on which it was built and the illusion of security it still keeps us in.

If your spiritual practice doesn’t touch the ordinary way of relating with your loved ones and neighbours, does not inform your way of navigating conflict in the world and does not ignite change nor hold yourself through the emotional upheaval that change brings, you are not facilitating transformation but the idea of it.

The idea of ascending was never one I liked, the masculine linear striving for heaven, away from the “sinful” and dirty earth, into meticulously pastel-coloured aesthetics or pristine golden solar powers or god. But only descending without expanding won’t serve the earth either. Not if it is done without accountability and community witnessing of rebirth. Hence why the path to Avalon is so important for our times right now. It is not an island to escape to in order to avoid your mundane life. It can well be a healing island that you retreat to for a time, but it will ask you to emerge reborn, with an old identity or conditioning that has died as you find your footing on the shores of your inner court and sovereign rulership in your life.

The still traceable motifs in the Arthurian legends, Welsh and Irish and Scottish myths and also European folklore point to a creation story that speaks of a much older goddess tradition.

We are living through an epidemic of dissociation, and much of the spiritual world has become a symptom of it. Of course at the core it offers the cure but only when integrated. Our calling has to be kindled after the first spark dies down instead of abandoned because it now requires true devotion. The embers are still glowing.

Don’t fall into the trap of escaping. Often the spiritual calling was a way to further dissociate from reality when truly it is meant to help you change your life, enchant the filter of reality, deprogram from the illusion that had you needing escaping in the first place. By hopping to the next ebst shiny thing or big promise you will repeat that cycle.

This is why this publication exists. Myth is not escapism. Spirituality requires you to deepen your faith, practice trust and return to our sovereign life choices. It is the most practical technology I know for psychological and spiritual transformation. The fairytale is not a distraction from your life, it is a seed of your becoming. Your fantasies and dreams are signposts of the true essence you are here to embody and let life reflect back to you.

And the point of all of it, every ceremony and every archetype and every etymology I will ever trace for you, will not only leave this world more enchanted and help you to truly change your day-to-day to a life you love living; it will also support us to build a world we no longer feel the need to dissociate or escape from, but one we can actually thrive in.

That is what “back to the future” means to me.

The return to myth, to Avalon, to the matrifocal traditions and partnership societies of our ancestors, not as nostalgia nor regression. We do not go back to romanticise a lost golden age or the matriarchy as solution for every problem we have or to pretend we can return to it unchanged. Our DNA, our culture, our history have irrevocably altered us, and I would not undo that even if I could. Because that is how deep my faith in nature (which means also US as part of nature) is, I believe this evolution and the times we live in all serve the purpose for change and possibilities of a more harmonious world. We go back to re-member. To gather the threads that were cut and weave them forward into something that can hold a modern, culturally mingled life. The old wisdom as material to relate to and make meaning with, not as museum.

This is why mysticism, magic and myth truly bring us back to reality.

They help us see through the illusion of a conditioned society that has strayed from the right path and is now finding itself deep in the woods, like the descendants of the well maidens and their assaulters in the Elucidation, only having themselves to find their purpose and belonging.

So if you found your way here, know that I welcome you on this quest for you to find your way through the dark, learning all the lessons in order to emerge expanded, matured and anchored in your heart’s calling.

Don’t forget that the times of resistance, of heartache, of despair are truly the times of the Great Mystery making itself tangible in order for us to integrate our calling and create from our human nature.

With a smile,
Laura

PS: I will open the doors to my priestess training The Worlds of Avalon this Samhain again but before that I am looking for brave hearts who long to facilitate transformation for others and do that in a way that is professional, in integrity and honours faith and friction. Reply to this email for more details.

PPS: If you are called to the path of Avalon and want an accessible self paced way to start and build a solid foundation, look no further, I offer it here: