21/11/2025
I wrote a piece for our local newspaper about a polarizing topic on our little island. Long for insta but If you have the attention span... 🐆
Listening to the Cougar: Choosing Love Over Fear
I created this t-shirt from a wish to help protect the cougar and to explore the fear its presence stirred. Over time, I realised the conversations it sparked revealed something deeper, how we project our unsettled anxiety and fear of death onto the world around us. We can hold our unintegrated emotions with kindness, offering them our full presence, no matter how uncomfortable it feels. When I began to witness this in my own practice, it blew my mind, this is the true path to freedom. Removing the cougar might make us feel safe, even though the odds of an attack are one in a billion. But what about the real risks we face every day, car accidents, falling branches, illness, or climate change? Death is inevitable. Can we choose to live each moment with grace? Can we tend to our unhealed trauma and live in love and freedom, instead of fear and control? I don’t write this from a place of having it all figured out, I am on the path, I still feel triggered, I sometimes hold rage, anger and grief in my body so I sit each day in practice. When I wrap my little son in my arms, my heart aches for this world, and what we have done for our future generations. The instinct to protect him runs deep. Yet even in that tenderness, I see how in every moment I need to take action and soften my heart, leading with love.
This is a call to protect and cherish what remains, our precious biodiversity and we have to do that in our own backyards. Every time a species goes extinct it blows a hole in the sophisticated intelligent net of what holds us. I’m writing this while reading The Book of Hope by Jane Goodall (you can borrow it from the library), reminded that even the smallest actions matter.
Nature is not something we control, extract and remove for our needs. As long as we believe we stand at the top of the pyramid, that everything exists for our benefit. We move closer to our own destruction. True harmony comes when we remember that we are not separate.... *cont in comments
