The Story of the Broken Pine Cone

The Story of the Broken Pine Cone

What ancient trees taught me about worth, visibility and finally allowing myself to be seen.

Yesterday, I celebrated the New Moon in Cancer with my beautiful friend, the Goddess Cezanne Poetess.

As part of our ceremony, she introduced me to her tree family.

These were no ordinary trees. They stood tall and magnificent, their thick trunks carrying the wisdom of generations. They were majestic cone-bearing conifers, estimated to have been rooted there for between 125 and 150 years. As we approached them, I found myself slowing down. I felt welcomed, but I also felt deeply humbled. There was a sense that I wasn’t simply walking into a woodland; I was entering a council of elders whose presence had witnessed countless seasons, storms, births and endings long before I arrived.

We spent hours with them.

We talked. We meditated. We embraced the trunks of these ancient beings. We stood barefoot upon the earth, allowing ourselves to ground, breathe and remember that we are part of something infinitely older and wiser than ourselves. For a little while, the world became wonderfully simple again.

My friend showed me some of the beautiful pine cones she had collected over time. They were perfectly formed, each one a small work of art. I remember hoping I might find one just as beautiful to take home as a keepsake of such a special day.

Eventually, I spotted one resting on the ground.

As I reached down and picked it up, I realised many of its scales had fallen away. My first instinct was to put it back and keep searching for one that looked more complete.

Then something shifted.

A message came.

It was the same message that has been finding me over and over again in different ways throughout this past year.

I looked at that pine cone and found myself thinking, It’s beautiful just as it is.

As I held it in my hands, I realised I wasn’t talking about the pine cone anymore.

Over the past few years, I have done so much work to bring my gifts into the world. Yet if I’m completely honest, the greatest obstacle has never been capability. It has been visibility.

Allowing myself to be fully seen.

There have been countless moments where I’ve questioned myself.

Who am I to be doing this?

What makes me think people want to hear what I have to say?

Those thoughts have accompanied me for years, even as I continued creating workshops, facilitating women’s circles, recording podcasts and building spaces where women could reconnect with themselves.

Recently, something happened that challenged those old stories.

I won the Rising Star Award.

On the surface, it might sound like I’m using an external achievement to validate myself, and perhaps there is a small part of that. We’re human after all. Recognition feels good.

But that wasn’t what moved me most.

I didn’t win because I had the loudest marketing or the biggest audience.

I won because people took the time to write about the impact our work together had made on their lives. The judging wasn’t based on how well I spoke about myself. It was based on the experiences of the women who had walked beside me.

Reading those testimonials felt less like receiving praise and more like receiving confirmation.

It was as though the Universe gently placed its hand on my shoulder and asked, How much more evidence do you need before you stop questioning the work you were called to do?

It reminded me that when you feel called to contribute to the raising of human consciousness, constantly shrinking yourself serves no one. It isn’t arrogance to answer your calling. It is responsibility.

We are living through a remarkable time.

The consciousness of the world is changing.

I don’t simply mean that information travels faster through social media. I mean that people are beginning to reconnect with parts of themselves that have been forgotten for generations. They are reconnecting with their hearts. With nature. With their intuition. With one another.

So much of what has been hidden is now being exposed.

In 2020, we experienced separation on a scale many of us had never known before. Yet perhaps one of the greatest lessons to emerge from that period is the realisation that what human beings truly long for is genuine connection. We long to remember that we belong to each other and that we belong to this Earth.

As I sat beneath those ancient trees holding that broken pine cone, I began to innerstand that nature had been teaching me all along.

The pine cone wasn’t diminished because some of its scales had fallen away.

Its purpose had never been to remain perfectly intact.

Its purpose was always to carry seeds.

To create new life.

A pine cone eventually opens. It weathers. It changes. It releases what it has been carrying. Some scales fall away in the process, yet none of that prevents it from fulfilling the reason it came into existence.

If anything, those changes are evidence that it has begun living out its purpose.

How different is that from us?

For years, I have looked at my own missing scales.

The abuse.

The addiction.

The homelessness.

The financial struggles.

The years of doubting myself.

The late ADHD diagnosis.

The times I believed I had somehow fallen behind everyone else.

I saw those experiences as evidence that I was somehow less complete than the people around me.

Yet perhaps those weren’t the things diminishing me at all.

Perhaps they were simply the experiences that cracked me open enough to release what I had been carrying all along.

Because here’s what I’ve come to realise.

A closed pine cone keeps everything hidden inside.

An opened one begins sharing its gifts with the world.

Maybe that is what my life has been teaching me.

Every challenge has stripped away another layer of who I thought I needed to be. Every experience has invited me closer to who I already was underneath it all.

When I first picked up that pine cone, I almost left it behind because it didn’t resemble the others.

How many times have I done exactly that to myself?

How many times have I looked around at people who appeared more polished, more confident, more experienced or more successful and decided I should wait a little longer before allowing myself to be seen?

Wait until I knew more.

Wait until my work looked better.

Wait until I felt more confident.

Wait until I felt complete.

Nature interrupted that thinking with extraordinary simplicity.

The pine cone didn’t need another scale before it became worthy of being picked up.

It simply needed someone willing to recognise its beauty.

Perhaps that is what so many of us are waiting for.

We spend years hoping someone else will give us permission to see what has always been there.

Yet inherent worth has never depended on perfection.

It simply exists because we do.

Looking back now, I can also see something else that fills me with gratitude.

For years I created workshops, circles and spaces to help women find the Goddess within themselves, even while I was still reclaiming her within myself.

At one time, I wondered whether that made me a fraud.

Today, I innerstand it differently.

Healing isn’t about reaching some mythical destination where every wound has disappeared before you’re allowed to support another human being.

Healing is remembering that we walk together.

I’ve often said that I don’t place myself above the women I work with because I don’t believe transformation happens through hierarchy.

What I’ve realised is that this doesn’t mean I don’t lead.

I do lead.

I simply lead from alongside.

I don’t hand women a version of who they should become. I create spaces where they feel safe enough to remember who they were before life convinced them they were unworthy, too much, not enough or disconnected from themselves. I offer guidance, reflection and companionship as they find their own way home.

That has always been the heart of my work.

It comes from lived experience rather than theory.

I don’t teach from a pedestal.

I teach from the path.

As women reconnect with themselves, something extraordinary begins to happen. Their nervous systems soften. Their intuition grows louder. The endless search for validation begins to dissolve because they finally experience something that cannot be taken away.

They discover that their worth was never something they had to earn.

It was always inherent.

As I sit here writing this, I find myself smiling.

I’m proud of the woman I have become.

I’m proud of the courage it has taken to keep saying yes to myself, even when I doubted the path ahead. I’m proud that I kept showing up, kept learning, kept healing and kept trusting the quiet pull towards the work I knew I was here to do.

Authentically.

Imperfectly.

Whole.

I can laugh a deep, heartfelt laugh at the twists and turns of my own life because when I consider everything I’ve survived, everything I’ve witnessed and everything I’ve overcome, I can honestly say this…

Here I am.

Self Reclaimed.

Fully embodied.

And every time I look at that broken pine cone sitting in my home, it will remind me that I no longer need to wait until every rough edge has been smoothed away before allowing myself to be seen.

The pine cone had already fulfilled its purpose long before it looked perfect.

Perhaps the same has always been true of me.

Author’s Note

A Personal Invitation

If you’ve read this far, thank you.

Perhaps the broken pine cone reminded you of something within yourself. Perhaps there’s a part of you that’s been waiting for permission to stop striving for perfection and simply begin.

This essay is more than a story. It is a glimpse into the journey that inspired The Self-Reclamation Method™ …the work I now use to support women in reconnecting with themselves, breaking free from repeating patterns and reclaiming the woman they were before life convinced them she had to become someone else.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to invite you to join me on Wednesday 23rd July for a free live masterclass. Together, we’ll explore the foundations of The Self-Reclamation Method™ and how it can help you innerstand why you keep repeating the same patterns, so you can begin creating new ones rooted in self-trust, self-worth and self-leadership.

It would be an honour to welcome you.

✨ Reserve your free place here: [Zoom Link]