The Enlightened Path Of The Priestess With Louise Marlena

Welcome!

Today we have Louise Marlina.

She is a visionary leader with an unwavering commitment to conscious leadership,

Sustainability,

And innovation.

She brings the transpersonal and the metaphysical into everything she does in her life.

As a dedicated priestess of Avalon,

She had a deep connection to the earth.

As CEO of Carbon Positive Australia,

She drives the change toward carbon reduction through innovative restoration strategies.

And before working with them,

She worked to fund 100 million tropical trees with the UK charity Tree Sisters.

She is passionate about creating a sustainable,

Regenerative future,

Advocates for environmental well-being,

And encourages a shift towards a more conscious,

Ethical,

And purposeful approach to leadership.

Welcome,

Louise!

Oh,

Thank you,

Megan.

Lovely introduction.

I wish it was 100 million trees.

Unfortunately,

It was only 10 million.

But I understand that the organization is now up around the 30 to 40 million trees.

And I just want to say that that was an act of consciousness,

Because that was the bringing together of many,

Many women across the globe,

All with a singular purpose to fund and plant tropical trees together.

And to do that in circle together,

Founded by the most amazing woman,

Claire Dubois,

Who is now based out of California.

So she was originally from Bristol.

But yeah,

That is a story of how consciousness shift and how we can transform our world in ways that we can't even imagine.

Lovely.

Well,

I'm just gonna leave that in there and call it 100 million.

Yeah,

Let's let's put it out there,

Hey,

For the future that they have to do that.

That would be right.

Manifesting.

Yeah.

Well,

The first question I'm going to ask you is the one that I ask everyone.

And that is,

What does enlightenment mean to you?

Funny,

Because it's a subject I didn't think a lot about.

So it's quite a hard question for me in terms of enlightenment.

For me,

I think more in terms of how can we awaken to what is around us.

And to me,

That is enlightenment.

Because as we awaken to the magic,

Which is this place on Earth that we inhabit,

And we are,

For example,

Sat in front of a tree,

And we see the tree,

But the tree also sees us.

And when we come to an understanding that the tree sees us,

As well as us seeing the tree,

For me,

That's a form of enlightenment.

Because at that point,

You can see yourself as the tree sees you,

And you can see the tree as well.

It's that connection to nature,

And that forced connection of knowing that the world is alive.

That's a lovely explanation.

I personally,

And I know you have too,

Feel that where you're seeing,

Not just seeing.

And that really is a shift in the way that we perceive our world,

Because we think,

Okay,

We're humans in this earthly world,

And we are the top consciousness,

And we're just standing under a tree.

But on a spiritual level,

There's so much more happening.

And I don't think a lot of people get that.

I think it's really interesting that the tree features a lot in our spirituality.

So the Buddha was sat under a tree.

Adam and Eve were next to a tree.

There's the tree of life,

The tree of knowledge.

I think there's something there that it's not just a symbolism of the tree itself,

With the roots and the branches,

But also in how nature is very much present in all of those stories.

And so we're very much seen.

In order to gain enlightenment,

We have to be able to be seen as well as to see.

That feels like a real truth for me.

And it's been part of my journey to,

I suppose,

Understand that in ways that it's completely un-understandable on one level.

More,

I would say,

To experience how can we experientially be with that.

And so one of the things that I've set out throughout my life,

I think,

Is to be in nature in a way that I can experience nature as well as just enjoying it for its beauty and all of the things that we all love about nature.

I mean,

If we go out into a forest or we go to the seaside or we go to a lake or mountains,

We can move into that sense of awe about what's present there for us.

And we can then move that awe into that experience so that we are beyond the awe into the experiencing of that place and open ourselves to be seen by the place.

Where it's an exchange versus a one-way experience.

Reciprocity.

I love that word,

Even though it's really hard to say.

I really love it.

It's perfect for this.

Yes.

So I want to talk about your spiritual journey.

What brought you to the work that you're doing now,

As well as your journey becoming a Priestess of Avalon?

So where do you want to start?

Oh my goodness,

Where to begin?

So I think if we go back to the very beginning,

I was always very interested in feminine spirituality.

What would it look like if God was a woman or God had a woman's face?

And there was a lot of feminist books written in the 70s,

People like Merlin Stone that wrote about what would the face of God look like if she was a woman?

And how would we experience the world differently?

And how would we,

As women,

Experience ourselves in our bodies and experience ourselves in the world if God was a woman?

And I can remember even as a,

I suppose I grew up in the 70s,

Which was a time when women were moving towards that more feminist quality agenda.

And yeah,

I can remember being maybe 12 and reading Cosmopolitan and getting very excited about being the girl boss and that whole feminist piece.

But I was very interested in the spiritual side of that.

So I read a lot,

But it was very academic.

I didn't feel any sort of heart into that.

And I think like most people,

When you get curious,

You want,

What's the experiential side of that?

And the experiential side of that at that time,

And I'm talking about probably the sort of late 90s,

Mid 90s,

Was very much there is a witchcraft power.

So you would do ritual and you would look at,

Yeah,

What Wicca and the whole witchcraft piece.

And I was very interested in that,

But not really.

It's kind of interesting.

It was yes and a no for me.

It didn't quite fulfill what I was looking for.

I love the nature element of it,

But I must admit,

Whenever I tried to do a ritual,

It would be like,

Well,

You need the yellow candle and the green ribbon and the,

Oh my gosh,

I can't get all the bits together.

I can't even do it.

It's too hard.

Yes.

And of course that's,

Maybe that's true,

But I think there's an element of that's really just not real and do spell craft and all that kind of thing.

It was just not me at all.

It was just not what I wanted out of spirituality.

What I wanted or what I didn't know at the time,

But what I actually wanted was a deeper connection to nature and a deeper connection to who I was in relationship to nature.

And I came to goddess,

Experiential goddess spirituality and trained as a priestess of Avalon in a kind of very synchronistic sort of way.

I was actually looking for a camping holiday as you do online.

And goddess conference was called in Glastonbury where the goddesses would gather and where women could come together and celebrate all things feminine,

Celebrate feminine spirituality.

And I just wanted to go,

I was desperate to go to this.

And I was a little bit nervous as well,

Because I'm like,

I'm going on my own.

I don't know anybody.

This could all be not at all what I want,

But I took my bravery in hand and headed off to Glastonbury for the goddess conference,

Which was run then by a lady called Kathy Jones,

Who was,

I suppose,

Instrumental in beginning a new,

A kind of goddess spirituality in the UK.

She,

Along with others,

Opened the goddess temple of Glastonbury,

Which was the first registered goddess temple in the United Kingdom since probably Roman times,

I would imagine when they had goddess sulis or whatever temples to have,

But it was actually a registered place of worship.

And she organized the goddess conference and I went along and I was just totally blown away by these women who were looking at spirituality in a completely unique and different way.

And yes,

There was the people who came from the sort of witchcraft groups,

There were overseas visitors,

There were lots of different ways,

But there was that deep underlying connection to the work that she was doing in Avalon that was connected to the place.

So Glastonbury,

For those of you who don't know,

Particularly some of your American listeners might not know of Glastonbury.

So Glastonbury is a very small town in the southwest of England in a place called Somerset,

County of Somerset,

And it is very much associated with the grail mysteries.

So it has a long lineage of spirituality.

The grail is supposed to be buried somewhere in Glastonbury and it was also Arthur,

King Arthur,

Who was the mythic king of Britain,

Was supposed to have been taken into Avalon.

So the Glastonbury is the landscape of the world and then there's a liminal world of Avalon.

So you move from Glastonbury,

The world,

Into the liminal world of Avalon and there was supposed to have been a priestess community in Avalon at some point in the times.

Of course it's a mythic reality,

So whether that really happened or not,

You know,

Who knows,

It's a mythic reality.

But through mythos and stories is often how we can find our way and you probably know there is a book called The Priestess of Avalon and some of the stories around that were brought forward from that book.

So what it was to have a priestess community in Avalon.

Now that was a story and a mythos,

Now there is a genuine priestess community in Avalon,

In Glastonbury.

So since the early 2000s women have been coming to Glastonbury to train as priestesses and there are lots of different lineages now,

Not just the Priestess of Avalon training,

There are lots of different Celtic Goddess trainings and lots of women who are claiming and reclaiming that title of Priestess of a Goddess and within that reclaiming they're doing ceremony,

They are taking people out onto the land,

They are teaching priestess crafts,

They are teaching ways of healing and ways of being in the world to others,

Holding space,

Holding ceremony,

All of the things that you would expect,

Even marrying people.

So they've even got legalised weddings here now so you can come and get married by a Priestess of Avalon,

Which is kind of quite cool.

Yes,

Very nice.

Pretty cool.

So,

But I'm kind of moving away from my personal story.

For me,

I was deeply connected when I came here.

I lived literally an hour and a half down the road so it wasn't as if I didn't know the place,

But when I came here I had an almost immediate connection to the land here.

And at the time I had no idea that it was because I had an ancestral connection to the land.

At the time I just thought,

Oh maybe I'm having this spiritual experience here on the land,

Here in Glastonbury.

But as it turned out with a little bit of investigation,

It turned out that my mother line was from Glastonbury and that I actually have ancestors going back here for centuries.

Wow.

So it was a spiritual connection but also a very real ancestral connection.

And so I ended up being here,

Undertaking ceremony,

Actually Priestessing at the Goddess Conference at one point and leading people in ceremony,

Leading trips and things for people to experience the land here over almost nine years in total.

Which was a very good lesson in how to be a practical priestess.

So I think sometimes we can think of that as a title that somebody wears that's,

You know,

You're quite often the high priestess of.

It's some kind of mantle that somebody's taking for themselves that's above something.

For me that's never been what it's about.

For me it's about saying that I have a connection to the natural world here.

I have a connection to myself through that and I am happy to share that.

So as a priestess that means that I take that as my sacred duty to share that experience with others.

So it's probably a very different way of thinking about the word than perhaps other people might think about it.

But for me that's been my experience and that's what I've been called to do.

And it very much led into my environmental journey because I think once you've seen and experienced yourself in nature you can't help but protect the things that you love.

And to me my deep connection and love of the earth,

Of the land,

Of the trees,

Of the water means that I can't do anything but that now.

It's wonderful to say you've combined them is a little cart before the horse because it just is,

Right?

But it's beautiful to see how they go together I guess is what it is because so many times people have personal aspirations or spiritual experiences but they keep them completely separate from their business world,

The career that they have,

The other work that they're doing out in the world.

And it's my goal anyway to combine those so that I'm not splitting myself.

And it's very very difficult because I spent my whole career trying to separate.

And I think in doing that you're not allowing your gifts to really be fully utilized because you're constantly splitting yourself in half.

And so it's important to combine them so that you can fully be yourself and also fully contribute to everything that's important.

Oh so true.

And look I want to say to your listeners I did not crack this on day one.

I spent many years of that period trying to do exactly what you're saying.

I would rush down to Glastonbury at the weekend,

Do my pre-stressing with staff,

Then rush back.

I was a CFO of a corporate organization at that point and then suit up,

Boot up and the two were not connected.

And eventually it got to the point where actually it started to make me unwell.

It's not a great recipe for a life.

And so one of the things that I share through the work that I do through Shoe Changes is how we can integrate our passion and purpose.

How we can bring courage.

How we can bring curiosity.

How we can bring more of ourselves to the amount that's possible for us at any one time.

I can remember when I went for my most recent job I actually said to them I'm a princess.

I'm a princess of Avalon.

That's what I do.

I don't hide what I do anymore because actually that makes me who I am and my ability to deliver on what I do in my day work.

Without that I could not do what I do.

I could not hold hold space for that.

It wouldn't be possible.

Yes.

So when you're separating them not only are you denying yourself that experience and that that for lack of a better term social proof of your passion but you're also just closing it off a little bit and or a lot and not allowing it to flow into the work that you're that you're doing if you're hiding.

I think maybe that was one of the things that I forgot that we discussed prior that I really wanted to touch on because that's a major part of my journey and it's also so many other people's journey that have to do something out in the world and maybe that's not in alignment with their inner self,

Their passion,

Their purpose and it's having the courage to step them together and combine them and hold that space for yourself against all other judgments.

And look it's not easy.

I mean we all have to.

I've been there.

We all have.

We've got to earn you know a living.

We live in this material world that's very much around money.

It's very much around being able to show up in a way that your maybe employer wants you to show up but there are I think so many opportunities for us to demonstrate the parts of ourselves so that we don't feel that we're having to hide.

So I'll give you a kind of a real life example of that in that in one of my roles prior to being able to pull things together I had an HR part of my role that I had to do and sometimes that's not a great job.

You're dealing with people who are not in good spaces sometimes and that's quite often why they're coming into that sort of HR space because they're not in a good space.

Maybe it's in their home life.

Maybe it's in their work life.

You know they're not getting on with somebody or the job's proving to be more challenging than perhaps they thought.

But one of the ways that I was able at that point to just bring a piece of myself was that other piece of myself was how do I hold space for that person to be really fully in what they're in without judgment.

Now had I not done some of the things that I'd learned through my priestess journey I wouldn't make been able to do that.

Now that doesn't mean to say that there are other HR professionals who don't do that because of course there are lots of them that do that that aren't priestesses so I don't mean it in that way.

What I'm saying is it meant I could.

So I was able to do that whereas probably before that I wouldn't have been able to and it gave me a certain amount of well that's actually benefiting me in that space and hopefully benefiting that other person that I've learned how to even just hold silence which sometimes that's all people need.

They don't need you to actually tell them what to do or how how to be.

They just need you to be there and just to hold that space for them.

So I would say there are many people who bring those skills in their day whether it's nursing,

Whether it's being a nurse,

Whether it's being a doctor,

In their day whether it's nursing professionals,

Whether it's people in care,

You know,

Without calling themselves anything which is why to me it's not a label it's about a way of being.

So I would just say for anyone who's in that space think of the places where you're already bringing what you want to bring and then it feels less desperate.

Yes,

It's important to spend time thinking about that because many times we're just rushed through our day and we're focused on where we are and we're too worried to transition because that seems to take a lot of effort and courage and everything and so we're really just trying to stay afloat,

Right,

Keep the lights on.

Yeah.

And that's where hours turn into weeks,

Turn into years and then we end up losing ourselves a bit and that's where you said that's where disease comes comes in too because eventually the further away you get from where you're supposed to be the more it seems systems start to break down.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

And look for me personally I had to make the break,

I had to kind of just stop eventually.

It got to the point where I had to stop doing what I was doing and I had to really think about okay what's next,

What does a really fulfilling job where I'm bringing the whole of myself look like?

And that came through working at Tree Sisters and ultimately I took that role as a volunteer to begin with,

I wasn't getting paid.

So I think one of the things we talk about a lot on the podcast is curiosity and we talk about courage and we talk about the barriers that stop us from changing and it doesn't mean that we've got all the answers either.

I think when I talk,

I also talk with Pollyanna Darling who does the podcast with me quite often,

We're just telling about our battle scars really.

Yeah.

You know it's not we've got the answers and it will be a different journey for everybody but I think sometimes it's just good to not feel like you're on your own.

Absolutely and that's what this whole podcast is about really.

Exactly,

Yeah.

Yeah everybody coming on sharing their story and their struggles and their failures and it's not necessarily all success stories,

It's just their tumultuous journey and that helps others like you said.

Yeah I think telling our stories is such an important element of what I do now is how do we tell our stories and the fact that I'm happy to come on you know a podcast and say I'm a priestess of Avalon and take people's judgment from that because there will be people that will judge from that.

It's just a commitment to being more courageous about living and being more courageous about who I am as a person and what matters to me.

Yes and in the course of your going through that and coming out on the other side,

What role if any did dreams play in sending you messages or guiding your path or helping you understand where you were supposed to go?

Dreams are such an important part of all of our lives.

I mean that's why I love the work that you do because dreams are we have this whole part of our lives don't we that's when we're asleep and one of the things writing down my dreams has always been really important.

So waking up in the morning writing them down actually I used to do morning pages it's called the artist way and part of the artist way is that you write morning pages so they're three pages of consciousness you know just writing whatever comes out your head basically and the idea is to shift your creativity so that you become more creative because all of that is out on the paper so therefore you're freed up to become more creative and I'm probably sure there's much more to it than that.

But I got into a rhythm of writing morning pages but what I found was after a while that my morning pages turned into my dream pages because I'd get up and do them literally on waking and so I would write out my dream and it gave me a place to kind of come back to my dreams and see what my dreams were perhaps reflecting in my day-to-day life and again I'm such a menopause brain at the moment I cannot remember people's names but there is this guy and I love the way he works with dreams which is he never expects that you you can understand another's dreams necessarily so what he does is he asks you questions about your dreams so that you can bring out more of your dream you know if I was the dreamer it sort of starts like that and I love that work as well because I love that there is symbolism in dreams that you will sort of recognize for me snakes appear a lot in my dreams and for me they've got their own symbology that's related to me I mean I know if you were to read a sort of average dream book I think they're about sex aren't they snakes or stuff but but snakes always come to me when I'm trying to make choices yes and I think I know who you're talking about it's I think it's one of the founders of the International Association for the Study of Dreams that I am part of and he developed his his theory that he developed was if it were my dream in in the group in the group setting dream group setting and that one is a little bit of a different approach because in a group people can discuss the dream without forcing a meaning on the dreamer so they're taking it as their own and then applying their own experience to it and saying well if it were mine it would mean this which takes the emphasis off the dreamer and gives them space so that they're not feeling you know accosted by the other's assumptions but on the other hand some people say it contributes everyone else's interpretation into the pot and then it's for that person to say to pick which is most relevant versus the method that I use which is which I've devised out of a combination of all the ones that I've researched and experienced and it also uses a question answer basis but it doesn't have anyone else's input involved so that you can basically draw your own conclusions from your own experience and I am helping you draw it out but there isn't hopefully mine or anyone else's outside influence confusing things yes yeah yeah so for me I started to see things that would recur because I was writing them down so I would see where those recurrences would kind of come and so I started to understand a little bit about what those dreams meant for me yes yes and that's one of the benefits of keeping the dream journal there's so many but especially in the case of recurring dreams it really helps you see the differences over time and the similarities over time and oh it's that dream again but this time it was it was slightly different and so on so I'm going to be honest I haven't so I did that religiously the point of phrase the point of phrase for almost three years I wrote down my dreams every single literally every day because I was doing these morning pages and then I kind of lost track of them as you do and and so for me it's something that I've always had an interest in but I've kind of dipped in and out of I think yes but there's something really I don't know tantalizing about dreams and what dreams are for and why we dream that just it's always that sort of lingering question because it is so tantalizing isn't it it's just so interesting why would we dream what's that about I mean I don't like the explanation that it's just kind of you know it's like a churn of the day and you know yeah I don't think it is that because my own experience of recording them over those three years tells me that's not true right and I think it also depends on the time of night the phase of the moon the state in our lives because there are some that appear more I don't know like aggregations of our day and then there's others that are just epic sagas and visitations with loved ones and crazy messages that just are so profound that aren't just you're at the grocery store it's so different so I think they really run the gamut and they never stop right until until we do or maybe they don't even because we don't so that's the other reason where I agree with you I've dipped in and out and there were many years where I did not listen at all and I did not pay attention at all but ultimately it's always continuing it's a continual process every day and every night and that's also why in my writing I am constantly oscillating between the waking and the dreaming state in my novel so the main character is constantly waking up and then going to sleep and waking up and going to sleep because that's what we do and so she's spending half her time in the dream world because that's what we do and that's not always really represented in fiction there's some times where it's the focus of the theme but very rarely yet that is our existence it's really interesting that you talked about seeing people that you love who've passed in your dreams because that has definitely been my experience I joked once to a friend I saw more of my father after he died than I saw before when he was alive I mean he did live in a foreign country so it wasn't quite the joke but it was true he for the first 6 to 12 months after he died he would appear in my dreams as regular as clockwork even if he was just kind of not even participating just present in some form and that was really interesting and it's occurred with lots of people that have passed and so that's very comforting I think to know that even though those people have passed that they're available to you in your dreams absolutely and that was one of the very powerful experiences that I had also after my father passed where he came to me and just started speaking to me and it was very obvious that it wasn't like some of the other dreams the visitation dreams are just totally different and you know yeah so that then there's really no explanation no scientific explanation for those experiences I think we know so little don't we about it in reality you know I'm actually a great believer in science and scientific principles but I also know from the experiences I've had as a priestess in various scenarios through my dreams that there is things that we don't understand and that's okay that we don't understand them at this point but I don't think we should be dismissing them either that's exactly right yes and that's really my one of my other missions is really just to say hey these are really important these are powerful to help us come into alignment and understand ourselves and tap into our own inner wisdom and the first step is just appreciating them recognizing that they are important that they're that they need a place in society which they don't have to barely any extent I mean yes there are people who have dedicated their lives to researching them but that's a very small percentage and the majority of us we got taught in school to appreciate them we might not be encouraged to talk about them at home we don't have any real way to understand them and we're on the contrary taught to be embarrassed or dismissive of them so I think that's the first step yeah and awareness and and just even talking about these things more I think is always a good thing and just bringing them into the awareness of others without necessarily expecting too much and I love the way that you do that Megan so I'm looking forward to being a guest on Tree Changes as well in the future so yes we can't wait to have you on there and to talk about dreams your novel and all of the wonderful things oh yes wonderful thank you so much for being here today Louise I really appreciate it and yeah I look forward to our future conversations yes likewise thanks Megan