Cassandra and the pinch of salt

I had enthusiastically signed up for the workshop - it offered an opportunity to journey for 6 weeks with a group of women, through a dedicated WhatsApp group and live online Zoom sessions. It promised an embodied experience of being witnessed, held and supported by other women, and an opportunity to practise a free exchange of skills, resources and energy. To experiment with what would happen when we rejected the received pattern of suspiciously keeping our cards close to our chest and instead showed up for each other as a resourced embrace. Witches around a fire for the modern age.

What the experience was like for me was somewhat different. Even though I generally try to keep my time on social platforms to a bare minimum, I committed wholeheartedly to both the live Zoom sessions and to the WhatsApp activity for the length of the workshop. What I discovered was that the rest of the group understood the commitment differently, and I found myself to be the most regular contributor by a long shot. I responded to every woman with care and generosity, shared as instructed by the facilitator, into a space that felt increasingly like an empty room. By the 4th session I was noticing a growing resentment. I was dragging my feet to show up, heavy with the discomfort of having committed to this and finding that I now wanted out of it.

So, I did the thing I have learned to do, which is to look at what was going on underneath rather than act on it. I knew that below that heavy rug of resentment, there was something I cared about, something I wanted. Once I could articulate that, the choice in front of me would become clear. I wanted the experience to be what had been promised, that free circulating of energy and resources between a group of women. I wanted to feel the holding and the exchange. And I felt sad that I couldn’t. The choice I now faced was to speak the thing no one was naming or to stay to the end and be polite. Or, I could leave.

Only one of those three had any charge in it. The two polite options were dead. The one that felt “juicy”, turned-on, the one my body wanted, was speaking the difficult thing. The easy options left me with a stale taste on my tongue, a contraction in my belly, and a painful sense of shutting down. But the tricky one, the one that brought me into closer relationship with what I cared about and what was at stake, I could feel as fire in my womb and an expansion in my chest.

I made my peace with what it might cost me. There was a good chance I would create discomfort in the group and be seen as disruptive or problematic. I might lose the group’s support, such as it was. It wasn’t the first time I found myself in Cassandra’s unenviable position; some of us are simply called to it. In the past I had either communicated badly or suppressed myself.

This time I spoke it carefully and cleanly. And then I felt the two things that came with it. The sadness of not being understood or met by those I had reached toward. And the discomfort of the facilitator’s defensiveness, of watching the person holding the room close rather than open. The subtle, pointed energy underneath the placating words.

The metaphor of the communal stew came to me, the stew that only exists if we all tend to it. One of us brings the meat. Another throws in a pinch of salt. Another stokes the fire underneath. Nobody stands over it all day and nobody does all of it, but each of us keeps it in mind, so that at any moment someone is tending it. This way we can all be nourished. And it depends on everyone chipping in to the extent that they can. If even one person decides instead to step away and put their attention elsewhere, the stew is thinner for it. If everyone does, there is nothing in the pot at all.

I have noticed lately that women often tell me, with something like pride, that they did not show up to a thing they had committed to because they chose instead to stay home eating bad chocolate wrapped in a fluffy blanket. Our culture calls this self-care, and it is understood as a destination, an end in itself.

I want to be very clear, that for a woman whose conditioning and whose wounds have taught her only ever to tend to others, learning to stay home and meet her own needs can be a real and necessary first step. I learned from my own mother a self-sacrifice that was paid in resentment and victimhood. It never felt generous and unconditional, because everything that was offered was at the expense of the giver. Desire and needs suppressed to service everyone else. I carried this model into my own adulthood for a while, until it dawned on me that there was another way. One that felt loving and open and life-affirming. Knowing when and how to tend to oneself is very necessary.

But it cannot be where the work stops, because we do not exist in isolation. The first step is to recognise our own needs and learn to meet them. The second has got to be to do that alongside our commitment to the collective. The trouble with self-care as it is sold to us is that it stops at the first

and calls it the whole journey.

Our culture teaches us, above all, to tend our own pot. It runs on an addictive game of mirrors, exacerbated by AI, which strips out the friction of being reflected by another human being. Our addiction has us reaching more easily for the little screens than grabbing our keys and meeting friends, and our information is pre-masticated so that we no longer have to grapple with opposing views. Gatherings where we might have discussed and argued ideas with friends, tested our thinking against theirs, have all but disappeared. Like Narcissus staring at his reflection in the pond, we stare at a version of ourselves and reality with all the kinks ironed out… one that offers absolutely no checks and balances.

Additionally, our modern life has us living pinned to the now, with no ancestral depth behind us and no foresight ahead, entirely bereft of the long view of those who once looked a few generations forward and planned for those not yet born. A culture stuck in the now consumes, because it has nowhere else to process its discomfort. And life is uncomfortable and mysterious. Being answerable to those who came before and those who come after is a form of belonging across time; strip it away and you are left with a self marooned in the present moment, whose only available response to the unease of being alive is to buy the next thing.

The mirrors cut us off from each other in space. The loss of the long view cuts us off from each other in time. Both leave the self alone and facing outward, reaching for the next thing to consume, and this is precisely the opening the wellness industry steps into, with a neat and purchasable solution to a discomfort that is not personal but collective. The pot, notice, needs both dimensions. You tend it for the people beside you, and for the people not yet at the table.

This is exactly what the workshop was meant to give us, an embodied experience of the second step, the tending done together. And because it ran on live Zooms and a WhatsApp group, there had to be some visible, felt way of knowing whether energy was actually moving between us.

Instead, the argument was that each woman’s private self-care was itself an invisible contribution to the pot. But the pot gives that argument the lie. If everyone decides to take a nap rather than tend the stew, the collective is not nourished. It just isn’t. An invisible contribution to a real stew is no contribution at all. Like Cassandra, speaking out in the group felt intensely vulnerable, and I knew in the silence that I would not be met. There was no unkindness but also no understanding. And I felt sad as I allowed my hope for something else to evaporate.

Nothing we do stops with us.

Every action ripples out, like the proverbial stone in the lake. From the way we speak to those around us, to the decisions we make for our children, and the food we cook to nourish ourselves. When we choose an hour of scrolling, it does not stop with us. Someone is filling their already full pockets off the back of our attention. We close the app having lost an hour we do not get back, while another reaps the reward.

But it goes the other way too. If we keep showing up, for ourselves and for the people around us, over and over, imperfect and tired and still willing to learn, we put something else entirely into the pot. And that ripples as well. Out to the shopkeeper who softened when you made eye contact at the end of a long day. To the grandchild who will always remember the feeble jokes and the bristly beard. To the friend who did not take his own life because you kept checking in, no matter what.

The thing that excites and sobers me simultaneously is the thought that if nothing we do is isolated, then perhaps there is no such thing as a truly private act. That hour on TikTok is not private; it fed someone. The evening you offered a tired smile is not private; it reached the shopkeeper. The self that self-care addresses, the self you tend to with candy and a fluffy blanket, is never sealed off. It is always leaking into the whole.

The “healing” we are being sold presents inner work as a destination, to a soothed and well-tended private self. But think of an orchestra. Each musician practises privately, and what they bring into the rehearsal and onto the stage is in direct correlation to what they did in their practice room, by themselves. Their solitary and individual work matters, even though no one was listening. Its whole purpose is to contribute to the whole in a supportive and creative way. And when every player brings their skill and attention to the stage, the music they play together transcends the individual parts. And it only takes one who didn’t learn their notes, or who fails to show up at the last moment, for the whole to suffer.

That is the more compelling reason to know yourself, to do the difficult excavation, to keep showing up in all our vulnerability and imperfection; not to arrive somewhere pleasant, but to learn to clear the ego of its fog, so that what flavours the pot is no longer its resentments, its neediness, its fears, and what we contribute becomes something more nourishing.

To ask this, that we be accountable to each other, that we tend the pot even when we’re tired, that we do our inner work for the collective’s sake as much as for our own, flies directly in the face of everything we are being told. The whole machinery, the market, the platforms, the wellness industry, is built around the outward-facing, consuming, self-soothing self, because that self is profitable and easy to manipulate.

But the pot knows nothing of these systems. Neither do our ancestors or our children. The machinery relies on us agreeing to become its cogs. The trick is to remember that you are not a cog. You exist as a vital part of the whole, a product of your ancestors and an influence on those who come after you, whether they are your own blood or not.

Tend to the pot, lest we all die hungry under our fluffy blankets.

If you’re curious about my work, my free e-book The Next Right Step is a good place to start - a tiny practice for busy days.