Exile of Animal Self

THE SEPARATION

For most of us, the separation begins early. Not in a single moment, but in many small ones that stack quietly over time. A cry that’s met with silence. A trembling dismissed. A truth corrected. A hunger shamed. These moments, though often invisible from the outside, begin to pull us away from ourselves.

We are born wild. Not reckless, but wild in the truest sense, unshaped, whole, and fully alive to instinct and sensation. Our first movements are not performative. We reach, cry, sound, not to be seen, but because that’s what life does. We are mammals, first and always. We arrive like wolf cubs, expecting to be met.

When the cub cries, the mother returns. When it trembles, it is soothed. In that early rhythm of response and contact, it learns that its body is trustworthy, that it belongs, fully, to its pack. We are born with the same expectation, not as luxury, but as biological necessity. Our systems are wired for attunement, for presence, for touch. Not because we are fragile, but because we are relational. Because we are built to belong.

But most of us are not born into dens. We are born into systems. Into cultures that have forgotten how to hold the wild. So we adapt, not because we are broken, but because we are brilliant. We trade instinct for attachment. We become watchful, compliant, pleasing. We learn to manage our truth in exchange for proximity.

And so the exile begins. We learn to stay small, to be quiet, not to need too much. We learn to shape ourselves around what is acceptable. We learn to survive by separating from our wildness. We give up our howl for harmony, sensation for strategy, truth for belonging. Because belonging means survival.

By the time we reach the school gates, the split has widened. We learn to raise our hands at the right time, to sit still, to find the right answer. We’re rewarded for obedience, and slowly our authenticity becomes something risky. Something to hide.

At some point, loud or quiet, sudden or slow, trauma arrives. Sometimes it’s a rupture. Sometimes it’s the ache of what never came. Francis Weller speaks of this as the Fourth Gate of Grief: the sorrow for what we expected and did not receive. This grief is difficult to name. It doesn’t always come with clear memories. It comes with absence. With a sense of something missing, touch, safety, presence, belonging. Not once, but over and over, until our nervous system quietly adjusts to a world that doesn’t meet us.

This grief doesn’t live in story, it lives in the body. In the breath we hold. In the flinch. In the parts of ourselves we had to silence. In the longing we carry into adulthood, hoping someone, finally, might know how to hold us.

It is this ache, this emptiness, that the Welsh call hiraeth, a longing for a home we may never have known, and yet somehow remember. It’s the ache not just for place, but for a way of being. A rhythm. A kinship. A presence that lives somewhere deeper than memory. Hiraeth is the soul’s homesickness. And it doesn’t just live in our personal story, it lives in the collective body. Because we have not only lost touch with ourselves. We have lost touch with the land.

“I do not know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention... how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields... telling them all everything I know, and listening.”
— Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"

THE REMEMBERING

The wild never truly left. It waited, quietly, patiently, beneath all the performance, beneath the numbing, beneath the grief I hadn’t yet learned how to name. It lived in the tremble in my hands, in the tightness in my chest, in the catch of breath when my bare feet met cold morning grass. It lived in the tears that came uninvited, without explanation.

It returned through dreams, through strange longings, through moments I couldn’t quite explain. The Deer came first. She arrived in the edges of sleep, still, watchful, luminous. She saw me long before I knew how to see myself. She didn’t bolt. She didn’t turn away. She waited. Not asking for anything but presence. And something in me softened, just from being seen that way.

But long before she appeared in dreams, I had to relearn how to listen. How to stop grasping for meaning and just sit with what I felt. To be still enough to notice. To not reach outward but turn inward. It wasn’t easy. My system had learned to scan, to perform, to search. But slowly, I found my way back to the quiet.

That’s when the Deer began to arrive, not just in vision, but in life. I began to follow their tracks through the woods near my home, tracing their movements in the soft earth. I learned to read the story written in their paths. I began to work with their hides, traditional tanning, done slowly, with reverence. I would spend hours soaking, scraping, stretching, softening. Listening to what the skin had to say. Each hide carried its own story, woven into grain and scar, into fold and hue. I wasn’t just learning a craft, I was building a relationship. With the animal. With the land. With myself.

I live on land where the deer still roam free. I see them at dawn, at dusk, their silhouettes moving across the ridgeline behind my cottage. They are not tame. They do not linger. But they are near. They remind me every day of what it means to belong without needing to be claimed.

But she wasn’t only gentle. The Deer was a threshold. A call. She carried the threads of a story older than words, something I’d read in myths, but now felt in blood. Artemis. Diana. The Huntress. Not a killer, but a protector of the wild. A sovereign body moving without apology. She who walks with precision. Who weeps for what she must take. Who does not seek dominance, but honours the balance between life and death. Between hunger and reverence.

And with her came the invitation: to pick up the bow. Not to dominate, but to understand. To know what it means to take a life with sorrow and ceremony. To witness death and not turn away. To remember that nourishment is sacred. That love and loss are not separate.

The Deer offered me the path of the Huntress. Not in fantasy, but in relationship. To walk awake in the forest. To move through the world with presence, precision, and grief in equal measure.

Then came the Snake, silent, low, coiled at the base of my spine. She didn’t speak. She shed. She showed me how to release what no longer fit. How to leave skins behind. How to begin again.

The Bear came when I was ready to fall apart. Winter-bodied, unbothered by performance. he didn’t soothe. He waited. He kept vigil while I unraveled. He taught me to stop trying. To stop pretending. To sit still in the dark and let myself come undone.

But it was the Wolf who led me. She came first in dreams, yellow eyed, pacing just beyond the reach of language. But she wasn’t content to remain symbolic. She pulled me. Across landscapes, through time, to the mouth of the sea caves, where the land opens to salt and shadow, and the wind sings in bone tones. I walked there because she showed me the way.

And there, in that cave, I met myself, older, quieter, salt-skinned, wilder. The Wolf waited not as idea, but as presence. She led me again, this time across the ocean, to distance lands, woven with Bears, and Wolves and mountain lions and in her mouth she held the invitation to meet the unfamiliar parts of me on unfamiliar land with its own breath, where the Bear came fully and where I reclaimed my voice and my body. And where I understood, though invitation from a Lone Wolf or maybe a Mountain lion I was being asked to finally embody the Wolf.

No more circling the edges of instinct. No more waiting for permission. It was time to live it. To own the growl in my belly. To trust my body. To track what matters. To move in silence. To grieve in song. To belong again, to the pack, and to myself.

And circling around all of them, swam the Orca. She has always been there. Not as symbol, but as presence. Some stories tell of her origin, that she was once a Wolf who loved the sea so deeply, she followed it into the depths and grew fins. These are the shapeshifters. The breath-holders. The matriarchs. They carry memory not in words, but in movement. In song. In the body.

The Orca lives at my centre. She holds the deepest grief. She moves beneath language. She waited in the stillness, until I was ready to feel again.

None of these animals came to me as metaphor. They came in dream, in land, in ceremony. They arrived when I was most severed. When I didn’t know how to be in my own skin. When performance had replaced instinct, and trauma had scattered me.

They came in pieces. In sensations. Through drumbeats and silences. Through the laying down of my armour on the forest flooe. Through the birthing of drums from hide and breath. Through the shaping of masks from ash and earth. Through the darkness, where the old ones still walk.

They came as The Masked Ones. Not spirit guides or abstract archetypes, but memory, living, embodied, ancestral. They arrived with mud streaked faces and animal eyes. Wearing the skins I had shed. They didn’t speak. They witnessed. And in their witnessing, they named what I had tried to forget.

The thing to be known grows with the knowing. The body is not separate from the mountain. The senses, too, can be paths.”
— Nan Shepherd

THE EMERGANCE

I have sat quietly for years with Animal Body. Holding it out, casting it away until in the Mountains spoke though my softened heart. Animal body is not a brand. Not a programme.it comes as a deep remembering. A vow. A contract between breath, body, and land. A howl carried through the bones of time. Not to be taught. But to be tended.

Because true spirituality, when rooted in land, body, and presence is medicine. But when it becomes untethered, when it floats above pain, above instinct, above place, it becomes another form of exile.

What I serve now is not escape. It is return. To the body. To the forest. To the grief songs and dream animals that still live in our bones. I carry this work with tenderness. And with teeth. Not to lead. Not to claim. But to offer the ember I was given.

Because this isn’t just my story. It’s yours. It’s ours. The story of what we lost, and the body that never forgot.

And if you’re quiet enough, if you stop searching long enough to feel… you might notice it too.

That subtle hum beneath your skin. The ache that isn’t just pain, but memory.

The part of you that still knows how to listen. Not for meaning , but for aliveness. This is where the wild begins.

And the remembering… it begins here.

With the breath. With the soil. With the body that never gave up on you.

THE BRAIDING

We do not need to abandon the world to remember the wild. We do not need to give up our phones, our comforts, our families and flee to the forest, though sometimes the forest calls for a while.

The truth is, we live in cities. We parent. We run businesses. We pay bills. We carry the tension of belonging to the land while moving through a world that often denies it exists.

But the wild does not ask us to go backwards. It asks us to remember forward.

To braid the wild back into the everyday. To feel the hum of the forest in your bones, even as you walk the school run. To harvest your grief like berries. To let your hands shape what is real. To tend your life like a hearth fire, slow, intentional, alive.

To feel the wind while waiting for the bus . To wear your wolf skin under your coat. To bless the kettle. To know the moon phase. To honour the animal of your body with food, rest, movement, breath, and boundary. And Joy.

The hunter-gatherers lived in constant relationship with land. We now must choose it, over and over again, in a world designed for disconnection.

And that is no less sacred.

In fact, it may be the fiercest devotion of all.

A GENTLE INVITATION

If something stirred as you read, a prickle in the belly, a sudden stillness, a pull you can’t name, let that be enough for now.

Let yourself listen, not for answers, but for rhythm. Let your body speak, before your mind interrupts.

If you feel the call to deepen into this remembering, you’re warmly invited to step into one of the Animal Body containers. These immersive journeys are not about fixing or transcending, they’re about returning. To your instinct. Your breath. Your grief. Your wild. They can be found on website www.weavingwonderment.com

With Love

Louise x