Ep 136 - How to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
with nicole barton
On the Secret Witch Show today, Nicole is exploring the wild, instinctual wisdom of the body through one of her favourite poems: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. This is a deeply archetypal exploration of the Secret Witch’s relationship with perfection, rebellion, desire, instinct, and belonging - and what it truly means to ‘let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.’ Drawing on her own lived experiences, motherhood, the Witch Wound, and the stories of women inside the Apothecary, Nicole explores how so many women become disconnected from the truth of their bodies through conditioning, hyper-vigilance, shame, and the pressure to be ‘good.’ This episode is an invitation back into the body, back into instinct, and back into the wild truth of the soul.
In this episode we explore the difference between instinct and impulse, and how the Secret Witch often misreads fear as misalignment - disconnecting from her deepest desires in an attempt to stay safe, loved, and accepted. Nicole speaks to the ‘good girl witch,’ feminine desire, visibility, nervous system conditioning, and the longing to reclaim our wildness without swinging into performative rebellion. She explores how desire itself can become an initiation - especially for women taught to suppress hunger, pleasure, erotic truth, and instinct - and why reconnecting to the ‘soft animal’ of the body is part of reclaiming feminine power, magic, aliveness, and soul truth. This is a poetic, honest, and deeply initiatory exploration of what happens when we stop monitoring ourselves and begin sensing ourselves again.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
The Secret Witch often disconnects from the truth of her body through both perfectionism and rebellion - and healing begins by returning to the ‘soft animal’ wisdom of instinct, sensing, and embodied truth
Perfection is often a strategy used to avoid the terror of being fully alive, and the Secret Witch does not heal by becoming ‘good enough,’ but by reconnecting to the wild truth of her body
There is a powerful difference between instinct and impulse - and learning to discern true soul desire from conditioned fantasy, fear, or shadow longing is part of reclaiming feminine power and self-trust
We often misread fear as misalignment, when in reality the fear may be the Good Girl trying to protect us from visibility, rejection, and the power of our own wild truth
Feminine desire has long been shamed, suppressed, and feared - and many women feel safer speaking about trauma than longing, pleasure, instinct, hunger, or erotic truth
Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese offers an archetypal invitation home: to release perfection, reconnect to the body, remember belonging, and allow the soft animal of the body to love what it loves
Resources and Things that We Spoke About:
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Resources:
Wild Geese - by Mary Oliver:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Thank you for listening, we’d love to know what comes alive for you in this week’s episode, so please let us know.
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Thank you,
Nicole and Team Secret Witch xox
