How Mermaids Changed My Life

I am so excited to be launching my Mermaid 101 Experience course! Huzzah!

I am so all about mermaids. I’ve spent my whole life devouring mermaid stories.

But mermaids are so much more than just fairy stories.

It’s weird how sometimes a myth, a story, can have such a profound affect on someone’s life. So, this is my mermaid story, and why I believe in mermaids so much as a tool for personal transformation. 

I always loved mermaids. When I was a kid I’d always pretend to be a mermaid in the pool, and I made a little house out of boxes and covered them with my own illustrations of the Little Mermaid, who I was obsessed with. When I went to art school and had my art crisis (what’s the point of art? there is no meaning to my craft! etc) I realised the only thing I wanted to do was paint nice pictures of goddesses and mermaids, but couldn’t find a way to tell my pushy teacher to fuck off with all the commentary of a society obsessed with a youth culture, I just want to paint mermaids thank you.

I left university and art behind and ended up making mermaids my job, performing as a mermaid at kids parties and grown up’s parties (we are surprisingly popular in the kink community) with my mermaid entertainment company.

Here is where it gets a little spiritual.

For years I have been searching for spiritual information about mermaids, but it’s always been a bit perfunctory and vague. It was frustrating, but I figured it was because they are so elemental and changeable and secretive, like the ocean herself – no-one could get a grip on them because they were so slippery.

Still, I knew there were things people were not exploring properly in relation with mermaids – desire and manifestation, for example, the depths of a mermaid’s and a woman’s feeling, and the mermaid’s true manifesto: self love, sovereignty and independence. It felt like I kept reading the same thing over and over – sea magic, ocean tides, romance, loosing yourself in another person, atlantis, lemuria – but never getting any deeper. I want deep. I need deep. I’m a double Scorpio mermaid person. We live deep.

After reading and researching and not finding what I wanted I decided, to hell with it. I am letting mermaids in, I am exploring this myself. So I had a sacred seasalt and candlelit bath, and called to the mermaids. I told them, come in – use me as your channel. Teach me everything you want me to know about you and about being a mermaid priestess in the world today. I fell deep into a meditation where I was floating in the middle of the ocean surrounded by mermaid spirits healing and guiding me.

Mermaids have also been a powerful inspiration to me because of their wild, untamable, totally feminine nature. They are uninhibited, in charge of their own lives completely, follow their feelings and desires and don’t give a crap what anyone else thinks. This archetype of the wild, sovereign mermaid feminine has been guiding me for years, but after my salt bath it stepped up a notch.

I started thinking differently. I started standing up for myself more, enforcing boundaries of what I would and would not put up with. No, I will not take that job that does not fill my soul. No, if you are going to be an hour late I shall not wait for you. It felt weird, but I felt honoured, protected.

I started accepting and owning my emotions, instead of feeling guilty about having any feelings at all which is mainly how I went through life before. Oh, so this pisses me of? Ok, I am pissed off. I seem to feel really upset about this. This means it must be important.

I started seeing my feelings and emotions as a guidance system, and I started letting myself see if I had a strong emotional reaction to something, not only was that OK but it was important to honour and listen to it. I started seeing how much I suppressed and ignored my feelings in every day life because I believed that emotions were weak and unreliable, had no merit and that they were what made women less than men. (I also couldn’t believe I had these awful self-sabotaging women-hating beliefs inside me about this! How horrifying to realise that you are poisoning yourself and your sisters from within without even realising.) I finally saw how deep and all-pervading the patriarchal culture is that would create this belief in me and in others, and began healing and fixing it. I let the mermaids guide me in knowing the true value of emotions and feelings.

I began to forgive myself for my mistakes. As a life-long perfectionist (such a perfectionist I would never call myself a perfectionist because I never got anything as perfect as it should be!), the mermaids started to show me how I could let things go and forgive myself for things that didn’t work out properly, when I missed a deadline for something, when someone was rude or didn’t like me. I learnt the mermaid motto – Fuck that!

I began to slowly, slowly, trust my own opinion more than others. I saw the pattern in my life where I constantly deferred to other’s opinions, assuming someone else would know better than me about everything. Even about stupid things. I remember being in a ritual and seeing that something I knew needed moving because it would be in the way for later, but instead of moving it and trusting my own opinion, I FOOLISHLY felt I had to ask a more senior priestess if I should move the thing. I needed permission from someone else to act, because I was terrified of being wrong and didn’t trust my own opinion. I felt like I needed permission from someone else – permission from myself was not enough. (I could see how ridiculous it was, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking!) Slowly, slowly, I am learning with the help and inspiration of the mermaids to listen to myself, to act from my own thoughts and feelings and observations, and not have to ask first!

What’s more, I began dreaming bigger. I began seeing how truly free and unlimited I was. I began to see how so much of what I did and what action I took was out of fear, not out of excitement or passion or love – fear that I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t deserve it, that I was too weird, that I wasn’t special enough, and I saw how that fear was encouraged by the human society we live in. (I began to sound a little bit like a conspiracy theorist for a bit! Society controls us this way, society controls us that way, rabble rabble rabble!). I decided I wanted to break up with the normal human world and live in a better one, a mermaidenly one, driven by love and desire and freedom rather than fear and control and smallness.

Every step I take nowadays is a step closer to claiming my free mermaid self, a step closer on the path to becoming a Mermaid Priestess. To me, being a Mermaid Priestess is about living the archetype of the mermaid – freedom, independence, sovereignty, living with love and passion and connection to the divine flow of the universe. It’s a path of embodying an aspect of the divine – the Wild Feminine, the Mermaid Goddess. It’s about living as a mermaid in the real world, and loving the experience.

I’m not saying I think mermaids physically exist in the ocean – I don’t. I’m not saying I believe in incarnated mermaids, because I am not sure that I do, even though I am fascinated by the concept. Or even that mermaids physically exist on another plane – I am not sure about that one either. Personally I see and experience mermaids as a Divine Archetype and as a expression of the Divine Feminine. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t passionately believe or even disbelieve any of those things for mermaids to make a difference in your life.

Sometimes I think it’s strange how something as weird as an obsession with mermaids can have made such a difference in my life and cause so much growth as a person. Then I think, if  something inspires someone so much, if someone feels such a deep connection with something, whether it’s mermaids or fairies or aliens or Lord of the Rings or whatever, maybe that means there is something there for them to discover.

*****

Mermaid 101 Experience E-Course

If you love mermaids and are ready to dive deeper and experience their transformation for yourself, join us on the Mermaid 101 Experience course. It’s like an in-depth 4 week mermaid crash course where you get to learn loads about the mermaid archetype, lots of mermaid stories (plus learning how to look at stories and mythology to see the deeper wisdom behind it), loads rituals and activities you can do to bring more mermaid into your day, lots of meditation mp3’s and worksheets and a whole community of other mermaid-minded people to support you and work alongside you on your mermaid journey! It’s going to be a magical experience.

A percentage of all sales goes towards helping tigers in Sumatra, AND the course is discounted at just £25 until February 1st! Ba-Boom!

Click here to learn more about the course and to book your place!