Hi everyone,
This Friday, 11 September, I turn 52.
It is also five years since my father died, on my birthday.
Five years. It doesnā€™t feel possible that he has been gone for so long.
Dad and I used to fight. We loved one another deeply, but we were also alike in certain ways. He rather liked to be the one who was right, so there is something absolutely characteristic about his choosing my birthday as the day he left this world.
Somehow, he had the final word. And, in doing so, he bound us together forever, which as a younger daughter would not have been my choosing.
Now, every birthday carries both of us.
And this is not the first time that life and death have met so intimately in my story.
My mother died just before my daughter Ruby was born. I was grieving the woman who had given me life while preparing to give birth to my own daughter. One generation was leaving as another was arriving, although grief does not make that exchange feel tidy or complete. A new life does not replace the one we have lost, so somehow, the heart has to expand enough to hold them both.
Perhaps this is part of what these great thresholds ask of us.
My birthday has become another such threshold. It is a day on which I am celebrated and my father is commemorated. A day of arrival and departure, life and death, gratitude and grief. Neither feeling cancels out the other, rather they sit alongside one another, asking to be held.
This has become one of the great teachings of my life: that we have to become capable of holding complexity on our life long path to self-mastery.
It can feel challenging when so much of our world asks us to choose one side of a polarity. Joy or sorrow. Strength or vulnerability. Today, as I sit in both celebration and mourning, my life feels at once sacred and entirely ordinary. Wholeness does not ask us to choose, and it is here, in the complexity and the mess of being human, that I feel HER.
The Goddess does not offer us stories in which everything is simple, pure or easily resolved. Her stories take us into love and rage, creation and destruction, devotion and betrayal, descent and return. Across countless myths, they reveal the depth of the complexity we are being asked to hold, moment to moment, in this modern reality.
And perhaps this is one of the deepest demands of leadership: not to rush towards certainty or divide the world into simple answers, but to remain present to complexity, hold competing truths, and still find the courage to choose how we will move.
I personally feel women know something profound about walking this particular tightrope. I created whilst grieving, and I recall so many times in my life and career when I've been leading while uncertain. And after this summer and all that it has demanded of me, I emerge exhausted and yet extraordinarily alive.
On my birthday, I carry this complexity in my very existence.
When I think about my father, so many scenes come to mind - I can still hear his voice booming enthusiastically at the television as David Attenborough, or another wildlife presenter, transported him to distant parts of the world to encounter the animals he so longed to see.
He had a deep softness for animals and for children. Whatever his harder edges, he knew how to recognise and connect with something innocent and deeply good.
He was not a particularly spiritual man. In fact, I think he had a real aversion to organised religion as it granted him no pardons. And yet, somehow, he recognised the Goddess in my mother and he worshipped her.
Perhaps he would never have used that language. But in choosing her, his goddess, who nurtured his orphaned young parts and supported the man who wished to emerge, despite the emotional hardships he'd endured. He made the perfect choice for him.
My mother was an Assamese woman from a Brahmin Shakta lineage, rooted in the worship of the feminine principle. My father was a Yoruba man from Nigeria. Their cultures were profoundly different, and their choice of one another in the 1960s made them both outliers.
I sometimes wonder whether my father recognised something in my mother that I would spend much of my own life learning how to name.
And perhaps this is part of what we inherit. Not simply our parentsā€™ beliefs or identities, but the deeper currents moving beneath their lives, fragments of their stories that still influence our own. The things they carried without always having language for them. The qualities, contradictions, wounds and gifts that continue to live through us.
This summer has asked almost everything of me. Holding Medicine Festival, the Isumataq Collective, my coaching & mentoring work and the emergence of 'Lead Like a Goddess', have made it one of the most relentless periods of work I can remember.
I am tired, if I am honest. But I also feel extraordinarily alive.
At 52, I find myself bringing work into the world that I could never have imagined when my parents were alive. Yet it does not feel separate from them. It feels, in some mysterious way, connected, ancestral.
A meeting place between the Yoruba lineage of my father, the Shakta lineage of my mother, and the woman I have become through loving, losing and being shaped by them both.
Lead Like a Goddess is not about religion or worship. It is an invitation to remember what is available to us through the ancient stories of the Goddess. Her courage and discernment. Her creativity and authority. Her capacity to enter the darkness, to hold contradiction and to return with deeper wisdom, allowing these qualities to shape how we live, choose and lead.
The Goddess does not ask us to become less complex. She shows us how to become whole enough to hold our complexity.
Perhaps my father saw something of her before I did.
So this Friday, I will celebrate the life I have been given. I will honour the father whose death became forever entwined with my birth. I will honour my mother, my ancestors, and the traditions and lineages from which the goddesses who continue to call to me arise, a voice carried on the wind, the exquisite beauty of a flower, or in the dreamscape of my sleep. And I will give thanks for all that continues to live through me.
What does it mean to honour our ancestors? Not only to look back at those who came before us, but to ask:
What have I inherited?
What within that inheritance is asking to be transformed?
And what, through the way I live and lead, am I now here to bring to life?
With love,
Remi
If you feel called to explore these questions with me, I will be bringing Lead Like a Goddess to London this autumn. Learn more and book the full day immersive on 4 October here.
