So beautiful 🤩

While waiting for my book formatting to be completed, thought I'd share another snippet from my upcoming Sacred Journey A Memoir of Loss, Love and Coming Home to Yourself. A CHAPTER... Two Heritages Visiting Crete, Belonging to Sicily and Scotland, 2024 At the end of my decade of sacred journeying, the journey turned toward the places where my blood comes from. Not the sacred sites of other people's traditions. My own. As with most things in my life, Crete arrived through synchronicity. I was attending a retreat called: The Celebration of Being Woman being held in Crete. The retreat centre already had my name on the door. I arrived to find that the previous retreat had left the name Maria on the door of the room that would be mine. The universe is sometimes not subtle. On the first evening, the sun and the moon were in the same sky, the solar and the lunar, the masculine and the feminine, in perfect balance over the oldest goddess island in the Mediterranean. A friend had asked me about my heritage. I could speak at length about my father's side: the Cucinotta’s, Sicily, the volcanic island, the migration to Australia. But when she asked about my mother's family, she noticed how much I struggled. I had grown up with vagueness. A shrug. Her parents were from the UK somewhere. Nothing specific. No town. No story. No detail. Just a kind of fog where the maternal line should have been, which, when I think about it now, was the mother wound showing up in the most literal way possible. Even the geography of her had been lost. My friend put the few details I had into an ancestry programme. And within hours, a lineage I had never known materialised on a screen in front of me. My mother's father was from Lothian, Edinburgh. My maternal grandmother's family were from Ireland. Edinburgh. Ireland. Two homelands I had never been told were mine. The Goddess Culture of Crete What I did not fully understand before I arrived on Crete was that I was stepping onto what may be the oldest goddess-worshipping ground in Europe.

From my upcoming book, Sacred Journey A Memoir of Loss, Love and Coming Home to Yourself… A DJ Saved My Life from a Broken Heart On music, the dance floor, and the men who held me without asking anything in return. Years before the sacred journey travel decade began, before Boulder, Bali, the medicine drum, or any of the language I now use for what the body knows, I went through the end of my first marriage. I did not go to therapy. I did not sit in a room with a stranger and explain what had happened. I did not journal or meditate or do any of the things I would later build a career around teaching other women to do. I went dancing. I am telling this story here, in the second half of the book, among the medicines, because I did not understand what the dance floor was teaching me until much later. My mind would take decades to catch up with what my body learned in a single night at three in the morning. But the truth of it belongs here, alongside the drum and the flamenco and the gathering and the rising, because the dance floor was where I first discovered the thing I have built my entire practice around: The body is the site of healing. Not only the mind. The body. This is why every workshop I create, every retreat, every circle, every programme will have an element of dance. Not choreographed dance. Not dance-as-performance. The kind of dance that shakes you. That moves through you. That heals you. Love Maria x

Working on my book blurb... She lost her mother at two. Her father nine months later. She spent a lifetime searching, across sacred sites on five continents and found what she was looking for. It was herself. Sacred Journey is the memoir of Maria Therase Cucinotta, a woman who grew up without ever seeing her own mother’s face and who spent fifty years gathering herself back, piece by piece, from the landscapes and the women and the ancient myths that held what her family could not. Each chapter includes a For You reflection that turns the mirror toward the reader. This is not a book you simply read. It is a book that reads you back. For every woman who has ever felt that something essential was missing and is ready to come home to herself.