The Serpent & The Wheel

I want to take a moment to introduce you to how this Wheel has come into being - to add some flesh to its bones - and to give voice to the questions I have wrestled with, both before offering this Serpent Wheel to the world, and in the time since.

In one sense, she - the Wheel - is revealing herself through me.

For the longest time I was desperate for this. Although, I didn’t fully understand what “this” was, nor what form it might take.

I only knew that something ancient and insistent was moving beneath the surface of my life.

I also longed for everything I have walked through to mean something, for the threads of my experiences, wounds, initiations, and knowing to finally weave themselves into a shape I could recognise.

A shape that felt like home.

A shape that felt like truth.

I wanted the knowing in my bones to come to fruition, to stop whispering and finally speak.

And yet, there have been times, especially recently, when I have fought her tooth and nail.

Most people who know me will have, at some point over the past couple of years, heard me say:

I am done.

I am done with the ‘deep work’.

I am done with dealing with the issues of others.

I have now come so far and done so much work to overcome my own stuff.

I am done.

I want to be selfish.

I want to do something ‘light’ fun, I said.

So, I bought myself a partially converted camper van and set about renovating it myself.

It has been fun,

and there have been lessons and growth in that too.

And yet, alongside this, and despite all my protesting, She was quietly having her way.

Just build the website, She said.

Just start synthesising your own learning, your own practice, She said.

Not for anyone else, She said.

Just For you. A way for you to understand and bring together all that has been learned, through the fires of experience, through mining of the intellect in courses and training, and through exercising the soul in magic and spirituality in all of it's shapes.

Eventually, I relented.

Ok. I can do that.

Somatic Resonance Alchemy was born (The Work)

It emerged as a synthesis of my skills, my lived experience, and the slow growing‑into the medicine name I was given by my shamanic teacher, Nairobi Red.

At the time, the name resonated deeply - the Red part made sense immediately, it is part of my birth name, and because I was already walking with plant allies, held by plant medicine, so the path of Red medicine had already begun to reveal itself to me. But I puzzled over “Nairobi.”

I could feel its power, its intention, its weight, but its meaning remained just beyond my reach.

I already understood what it meant to receive a name intentionally, ceremonially, and with potency.

Three years earlier, I had been initiated into an occult order and given a name there too, one that carried its own lineage, its own shadow, its own activation and its own medicine.

So, I knew that being named is never arbitrary.

It is an act of recognition. A calling. A mirror.

Still, this new name asked me to grow into it, to embody something I could sense only dimly at first, like a shape forming behind a veil.

And so Somatic Resonance Alchemy began as the weaving‑together of those threads: the lineage of my training, the bones of my journey, and the name that asked me to expand into its fuller meaning.

I am sometimes asked whether I consider myself a shamanic practitioner. I don’t. Although I honour and work with shamanic practice, as I honour my magical and occult path; and equally, though people speak of it less in these spaces, my twenty years of 12 step recovery.

There is a technology inside 12-step work that the wider world rarely gets close to.

The door in is usually desperation.

Most people only arrive there through addiction.

What I have wanted, in building the Wheel, is to find another door, one that opens for people who carry the same need for depth, the same unacknowledged desperation, but haven’t yet found what to call it.

Its principles are universal.

There is something else I need to name, because it has sat heavily with me at times.

The Serpent Wheel is a Continental African Wheel.

Its directions have been walked on the land itself, held in the bones of the continent. This Wheel is not abstract, symbolic, or borrowed; it breathes out of Africa’s soil, its migrations, its memory.

My own connection to the African continent is not theoretical; it is lived through my blood, my memory, and my history. I am born of Egyptian and English heritage, and that dual lineage has shaped me in ways I am still unravelling.

That it itself has been its own lifelong negotiation.

I spent years of my childhood in Egypt, years that imprinted themselves on me long before I had any language for what I was experiencing. Later, I lived in Ghana for several months, during one of the most pivotal and vulnerable periods of my life: when I was pregnant with my first child.

That time shaped me profoundly.

Many of those lessons were harsh.

They were formative in the way only raw, unguarded life can be.

Those experiences, the tender ones, the difficult ones, the ones carried through ancestry and the ones lived in my own body, are part of why this Wheel speaks through me at all.

They are part of what called me to it, and part of what makes me careful with it.

And then there was South Africa.

Going to Cape Town activated the Wheel for me consciously. I knew that something was calling me before I stepped foot on that land.

From the moment I booked the flight, something in me surged awake. The flight was weeks away, yet I felt an urgency so visceral I had to fight the urge to drop everything and get on the next available plane.

The call was unmistakable.

It wasn’t romantic.

It wasn’t imagined.

It was a summons.

And when I landed back in the UK, just one week later, everything broke open.

I woke the next morning and the Wheel burned in me, not as an idea, but as a living force.

The teachings started to pour through.

Every thread of my history, ancestry, work, pain, and knowing converged.

Nothing was separate.

Nothing was theoretical.

It all arrived, not yet fully formed, but demanding to be seen.

So, in a world where plant medicine and indigenous peoples, lands and practices are being packaged, sold, and turned into products worth thousands of pounds, where colonisation is still very present, I had to ask myself a hard question:

Am I appropriating Africa?

I’ve always had an aversion to packaged spiritual products.

I don’t even call myself ‘spiritual’ anymore.

Nothing I do is a rebranded template or a polished offering.

This is one of the reasons my work doesn’t have a shiny public face full of Instagram reels.

It’s not a product.

It’s a process.

It’s an initiation.

She calls you…she has her own terms, you don’t buy your way into it.

The Wheel holds practices that are universal, but it’s anchors and its momentum comes through the land that birthed humanity.

So yes, I have sat with this question of appropriation...

But what I know now is this:

The Wheel didn’t come to me because I went looking for it.

I didn’t claim it.

It claimed me.

It rose through the land, through my lineage, through the old memories that live in blood and bone.

My relationship with it is not an act of taking, it is an act of remembering.

A returning.

There are also times when the emergence of this Wheel feels too much, too exposed, too demanding.

Someone who recently came into contact with The Serpent Wheel asked me,

“What qualifications do you have?”

It stopped me in my tracks for a moment. I had to think about what the real answer

was,

what the truth underneath that question actually is.

I explained the condensed version, that I began studying occult teachings at 15, that I’m trained in body therapies like reflexology, Indian head massage, and Reiki, and that I am trained in psychological therapies including hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, coaching, and trauma‑based work like EMDR.

I’ve worked with people through holistic practice for many years, and more recently as a qualified social worker with fifteen years’ experience, at the coal face. I’ve read, studied and practiced spirituality my whole life, and I have been formally initiated into a Western occult path, and into a shamanic path and practice.

Yet none of those, as intellectual pursuits, or the bits of paper I have, are what qualifies me.

What qualifies me is the path I have walked in the world, the agonisingly long journey of recovering myself, remembering who I am, facing my worst fears, meeting myself honestly, and unearthing the memories buried deep in my bones.

All the rest, the certificates, the tools, the trainings have helped me along the way.

And She, has been quietly guiding me, nudging me here, pushing me there, blocking my path when I’ve strayed off it, or when I’ve learned enough from one direction and need to turn toward another.

She ensured I would meet the people who would be the light on my path when things were so very dark, I could not see at all.

I have felt her with me, in my lone hours,

the ones no one sees,

when strength falters and the real work begins.

Anyone involved in a creative process knows that it is an intimate relationship, with yourself and with something else.

Something that has its own consciousness.

Something that wants to be a particular thing in the world, and you just happen to be the right doorway for it.

You and it are in perfect alignment, and once that happens, there is very little you

can do to stop it.

It occupies your waking life

and your dream life.

It accompanies you everywhere, whispering ideas, exerting its influence.

It is both you and not you.

A beautiful and excruciating mystery.

One that leaves you feeling so deeply in touch with your own life force that you are willing to give every ounce of yourself to it.

I am not bringing the Wheel out as a completed thing.

It isn’t a product.

She is a living, evolving being and I am living and evolving with her.

The East and Centre directions are the ones I have not yet walked, undiscovered ground.

They are unfolding as my journey towards them unfolds.

The Wheel leaves space for continued evolution.

It is not static, fixed, or finished.

That is exactly why she wanted to come through now, before I have completed the whole path myself.

This is the mystery, magic, and mayhem of The Serpent and her Wheel.

Is she calling you?

Just Ask