at the seabed of ourselves
In this season of heartbreak, loss, grief, longing, and learning to navigate the world as a single person again, I find myself alone on the emerald green isle of Ireland.
Without really planning it this way, I have been making an almost clockwise journey around the circumference of this country, and I don't know if I have ever been so awe-inspired, so impressed, or felt so close to God, Goddess, Spirit in my entire existence.
And I have been to many, many beautiful places.
But there is something about encountering these places — sacred sites, ancient stones, mountains, caves, holy wells, landscapes that have existed for hundreds of millions of years — while simultaneously navigating such a new transition in my life.
For almost the entirety of my adult life, I have been someone's partner. And now, here I am at 35, navigating the world as a single person again.
Through all the heartbreak, loss, grief, sadness and longing, I have also found myself in complete, wordless awe at the majesty and magnificence of God's creation here on the land of Ireland, on the body of the goddess Ériu.
And something that has touched me so deeply through this solitary journey is how much my relationship with myself is deepening simply because I am having to become curious about myself again.
My pace. My rhythm. My desires. My motivations. My longings.
There is something very interesting about travelling alone and making decisions without having another person to consider. I wake up in the morning and I get to ask myself: What do I want to do today? Do I actually want to go there? Do I want to walk for four hours? Do I want to turn around? Am I tired? What do I want to eat? What am I gravitating towards? What moves me?
When there is nobody else's hunger, tiredness, preferences, pace, music choices or desires to negotiate with, there is just you. And I am realising how intimate that is.
I am learning what I like again.
This journey has brought me tremendous highs, simply because of the magnificence of this place.
There have been moments here where I have felt so close to God that I genuinely don't know how to put the experience into language.
But there have also been moments of tremendous lows, where the intensity of beauty and adventure softens and I find myself meeting with a complete void.
And it isn't a void of sad emptiness. It feels much deeper and more ancient than that.
What I have come to understand about the psyche and human nature is that there is something incredibly precious beneath these experiences of the void. Our gold, our essence, the deepest parts of ourselves can be found beneath them.
The void itself can become a doorway.
I have been thinking about how easy it is not to feel this void when I am with friends or when I am in a relationship. Whether I am tending to another person or relying on another person to tend to me, there is somewhere for my attention to go. There is somebody to speak to, somebody to consider, somebody to reach for. And even outside of relationship, there is work, creation, our phones, our plans, our responsibilities. There are endless ways not to come close to this place.
But I have been learning to stay with this feeling.
To know that there is nothing to fix here. To know that I don't have to immediately fill the space or interpret it as evidence that something is wrong. And to trust that the longer I am willing to spend there, firstly, I will be okay, and secondly, perhaps this is one of the ways I learn to touch my truest essence. My deepest self. The part of my soul that can only really be accessed when I am willing to become quiet enough to meet her.
I am deeply grateful for this experience.
Because through this journey of relearning who I am after being in relationship for the past decade of my life, I am remembering that it is truly my responsibility to take care of this very precious thing within me.
And this part of ourselves is so easy to forget.
I can take time to journal, to move, to practise yoga, to meditate, to have my quiet cacao contemplation. I can do all of the things I know bring me closer to myself, and I still don't necessarily connect with this deep, deep part of me just like that.
It feels like she requires something more.
She requires a steady, unwavering container of knowing that I am here for her.
And this is what inspired the birth of For You, My Little Love.
I wanted to create that exact container.
Because sometimes our feelings and emotions feel too big for the body to hold by itself, and we need a bigger container.
For me, sometimes that container is music. It is musicals, movies, stories and myth. This is one of the reasons I love mythology so much, and one of the reasons I love pilgrimage. The land can hold us when we cannot hold everything by ourselves.
And the container is also community. Soul family. Other people sitting beside us without needing to take the experience away.
This is what I am creating in Ubud, Bali.
The land will hold us. The community will hold us. The experiences we enter into together will hold us. And within that larger container, we get to turn our attention towards the relationship we have with ourselves.
Our days will include yoga, voice, dance, cacao, song, council, art, ritual and ceremony. There will be moments where we sit together and talk, moments where we create, moments where we move and sing, moments of silence and solitude.
Everything I am curating is deeply intentional.
Every ritual and every experience is another doorway through which we might meet the most treasured, precious and sacred part of ourselves.
The daimon. The genius. The acorn.
That original essence within each and every one of us that lies at the seabed of our very being.
And of course, serendipitously, Ireland has given me the physical experience for exactly what I am trying to describe.
Over the past few days I have been in the Burren, on the west coast of Ireland in County Clare. I have been walking and driving across this extraordinary limestone landscape that began forming more than 300 million years ago, when what is now the Burren was beneath a warm tropical sea.
I realised that I was literally standing on an ancient seabed.
And that has stayed with me, in a very profound way.
Archetypally, this is what we will be doing together in Bali.
We will be descending to the seabed of ourselves.
Beneath the surface of our lives, beneath the identities we have accumulated, beneath who we are to our partners, our children, our families, our clients and our communities, beneath even the versions of ourselves that we have become attached to. We will have four days to become curious about what is there when we descend beneath all of that.
And when our feet finally touch the seabed, perhaps we discover that there isn't something terrifying waiting for us there.
Instead, there is something precious.
Not a better version of ourselves. Not the woman we think we should become. Something much more original than that — the particular essence that was ours before we learnt who we needed to be for everybody else.
And we get to meet ourselves there, in stillness, in solitude and in company.
I want us to spend four days becoming more and more acquainted with her. To know what she likes.
What she wants. What delights her. What moves her. What she is tired of. What she longs for. What she is becoming.
To feel like we are courting ourselves.
And maybe, as you're reading this, you recognise something of yourself here too.
Perhaps your life is actually very full. Perhaps you love the people in it deeply. Perhaps you have already done years of inner work and know yourself very well.
You don't have to be lost to want to know yourself more.
Maybe there is simply a part of you that you haven't sat beside for a while.
Maybe you have spent so much time anticipating what everybody else needs that you have forgotten what it feels like to have an entire experience created with you in mind.
Maybe you would simply like four days to become deeply, deliciously interested in yourself again.
You don't have to be in a massive life transition to experience this. You don't have to be healing from a breakup. You don't have to be single. You can be partnered, married, a mother, all of these things and none of these things. There are endless faces of the feminine that live within each of us.
This is simply an invitation to know the most precious part of you.
For You, My Little Love will be held from 1–4 November 2026 in Ubud, Bali, with check-in on 31
October.
Four days together during Scorpio season, which is literally the most perfect season for this very descent: going beneath the surface, becoming intimate with what is hidden, and allowing ourselves the time to hang out there.
There will only be five participants, and there are four places remaining.
Together with me, we will be an intimate circle of six women.
The retreat is SGD 2,900, with everything during our time together taken care of.
For four days, you will experience what it feels like to stop being the one who anticipates, prepares, organises and takes care of everyone else.
You don't have to think about where we're eating, how we're getting there, what we're doing next, what needs to be booked, what needs to be brought, or whether everybody else is having a good time.
You get to arrive and receive.
Your retreat experience includes your own private room and ensuite bathroom for four nights in our beautiful private villa in Ubud; all meals, including some gastronomic delights at beautiful restaurants in Ubud that I personally love; and all land transfers during the retreat.
Everything we do together is also included — all retreat activities, rituals and ceremonies, as well as our artisan experiences and all the materials we will use to make beautiful things ourselves.
Most importantly, you will be held within our extraordinarily intimate circle of six women.
A close community, because sometimes we need other people to help us hold what is too big to hold alone.
Four days of deep time.
To travel deeply enough into ourselves to meet the one who has been there all along.
And maybe, by the time we leave, we know her face a little better. We know her voice. We know what she likes. And we have begun to build that steady, unwavering relationship that says:
I am here. I know you. I will take care of you.
If something in you has been quietly tugging as you read this, I would love for you to reach out to me.
You don't have to decide anything right now. You don't have to know whether you're coming.
Just write, “Steph, I'm curious.”
There are four more women who will gather with me in this little circle.
Maybe you are one of them.
For you, my little love.
Steph
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