Woman, Do Less

The feminine way of "manifesting" your dreams

I was talking to a sister the other day who is in the first couple of years of her wellness business, and things aren’t popping off the way she imagined in her mind (thanks to patriarchal conditioning, industrialization, and capitalism). She was going on and on, telling me she just needed to do more, focus more, work harder, etc…

This kind of talk really gets me going because I’m so tired of women defaulting to not-enoughness when they aren’t immediately profiting off (the misuse of) their creative force.

That is NOT the issue.

You are enough, and I bet you are doing SO MUCH on your own to make life happen. I bet you are fucking brilliant, with so much magic and medicine and wisdom to offer this world.

The real issue here is that forcing, pushing, and doing is NOT your path to creating your visions/business/dreams in integrity with who you truly are, dear woman. This is not creation; this is production. And this takes all the healing, magic, possibility, and medicine out of the creative process and instead extracts from life itself.

This way of creation was imprinted by the industrial machine, carrying the very conditioning that depletes a woman’s body of her fertility, health, and vitality if she tries to compete with it because it goes against her natural rhythm.

Not only that, but the programs written inside a woman’s psyche from thousands of years of patriarchal abuse and severance from nature and the Mother have left women disconnected from themselves. No wonder it feels so hard to create, when creation is your truest nature.

In this piece, I’m going to tell you the real reason your business isn’t popping off the way you think it should be, why your dreams are not manifesting, and why your longing grows bigger and bigger without satiation in sight.

We are daughters of Mother Earth, not capitalistic machines. The way for the feminine to create is by making good, fertile soil for seeds to take root and grow. What I mean by that is, if you were to pull a plant up by the shoot expecting it to grow faster and taller, you would only uproot it and likely kill it in the process. But if you feed the soil, lovingly tend its roots, and give it what it needs, it will grow effortlessly. But often, this requires deep soil regeneration and disengagement from the modern Western construct of time.

This is what you must apply to anything you wish to grow in life.

You will likely see faster and more radical success by composting your toxic relationship than working 40 hours a week.

You will naturally have greater visibility in your work if you purge the ancestral curse within your psyche that says women shouldn’t be heard, rather than shouting from the top of your lungs.

And you probably will find the dream home you’ve been manifesting for years if you root so deeply into your body, let go of all the wounds you’ve been carrying around belonging, and come home to yourself, rather than spending hours hunting on Zillow.

All the time spent searching, pushing, forcing, and doing depletes your creative reserves. This is what drains your fertility, vitality, and causes a whole list of mysterious womb and health imbalances (cue fibroids, endometriosis, autoimmune dis-eases, etc).

I have a little story for you about when I first saw the results of creating from a deeply feminine, in integrity with my nature, regenerative space, and how this became a foundation of my work I now teach.

My biggest dream since I was 6-years-old was to create a tarot deck. I used to sit in my grandmother’s den and play with her cards, knowing one day I was meant to create something similar. Fast forward ~20 years, and I decided I was ready. So, over the course of 4 years, I slowly and intentionally created my oracle deck, Messages from the Heart of the Divine.

During these 4 years, my tattoo work was taking off, which I believe to be a direct result of trusting the vision for the deck and saying yes to something greater than me. I believe this because the week I decided I was never going to work for someone else again and was ready to be of greater service, I got my first major tattoo press without even having a website or posting my work on Social Media. I was in Brooklyn magazine alongside famous tattoo artists after tattooing less than 10 bodies that came to me through word of mouth. No vision board, forcing, or manifestation list.

But with this sudden flow in my work came many opportunities for really deep foundational healing to hold what I was creating. I went viral a few times without even desiring the exposure, was publicly humiliated, canceled, and often criticised by strangers on the internet for my art. Again and again, I was told my art was horrible, and that I shouldn’t be creating. I was even told I was defacing bodies and received a death threat or two. And these were just the tests that were performed on a public stage.

I was devastated. The heart of that same 6-year-old girl in me broke each time.

But life had a very specific purpose in bringing these pests into my garden: to undo the shame around my art and root my dreams of being a successful artist so deeply into the garden of my life that they would become unwavering to the forces of criticism and projection.

I dove into my inner healing and came out on the other side blooming. I no longer cared if anyone liked my art, because I enjoyed creating it, and joy is a big part of my medicine. And this trust in myself gave me a waitlist of clients, with hundreds if not thousands of people (99% women) wearing my art on their bodies today.

And so, when I was complete with the first draft of my oracle deck and ready to take the next step, everything happened without any effort. And fast.

Truly, the biggest effort was the slow, steady, and deep process of creating over a few years, which brought me so much joy, pleasure, healing, and inner peace. Once that part was done, the universe handled the rest. A literary agent literally fell into my lap in the most cosmic and synchronistic way. My dream publisher at the time signed me (Sounds True), and I became one of their youngest authors. They out of the blue asked me to write a book, and both my first book and deck were birthed into the world a couple of years later (slight delay due to COVID).

Nowhere did I push or force or try to make anything happen. The book came through me during a soul regression journey a few months prior, and I didn’t have a title, an outline, or even say that I wanted to write a book out loud when the offer to write it was presented to me. I simply spent time tending my inner soil to hold what it is my soul truly desired to create, and what the earth mother’s prophecy for me is in this lifetime. It simply was revealed, and I stepped into it. The rest just happened, because that is the way of nature. Even though it was terrifying, I got out of my own way and trusted what was ready to be born through me.

I’ve been working on my next book for FIVE years now. And while only a small fraction of that time has been spent actually writing, the unseen feminine labor of birthing this creation has sent me so deep into the soils of life that I am not the same person as I was when the voice of my soul dropped the name of the book through me while driving in the car five years ago.

To create this book, I had to compost an entire life to create soil fertile and rich enough to hold it. I got a divorce, stepped into leadership, became a full-time traveler exploring the earth to pull stories of the feminine out of the land and through me, faced my intimacy wounds, my fears of being seen, all the persecution of the oracle and witch, my deepest core traumas and what they left behind in the foundation of my being, learned how to protect my fertility by stoking my aliveness and prioritizing pleasure, and let life move me along to the birthing of this legacy creation my soul is destined to birth.

And, now, this book is ready to be born. It’s descended into the birth canal. Not because I pushed or forced, but because I created the space for life to happen through me. And when people ask me how I’m going to get the book published or what happens next, I tell them I don’t worry about it, because I know that part will be taken care of for me. I trust in how I am designed to co-create with spirit and the earth.

We can see this distortion of creation in the way modern women are taught to birth babies. They are told to fear their nature, and then push and push for their baby to be born. But when a woman is left to her own creative rhythm, she will labor her baby into this world by becoming a bridge, trusting her power, and using her voice. Nature will do what it is designed to do, and when you disrupt that, complications arise.

If you think your dreams will manifest by doing more, go ahead and burn yourself out. You may get what you are trying to get (money, success…but truly, security, freedom, etc), but it will likely be at the expense of your joy, pleasure, health, and aliveness.

But if you really want to build a bountiful garden of your juiciest dreams—things that you can’t even imagine yet, as you have to be so rooted in your body upon the navel of the earth to awaken them—start with your foundation.

What needs composting? What has outgrown its container? What needs more nutrients and some TLC? Do you even have space for the seeds of your dreams? Are you too busy tending other people’s gardens that your own has gone neglected? This, woman, is your work. Let nature handle the rest.

And this work must be valued in order for the magic of it to unfold. It may be invisible labor to modern society, but it is high-level alchemy and oracular mother magic that will change your reality.

A couple of years ago I was at an event where a speaker was talking about how we only have a handful of years left of healthy topsoil for growing food upon the earth. My first thought was not “Oh shit, humanity is about to starve,” because we already are, but how this is mirrored in the body of the woman. If the feminine continues to deplete her reserves by creating against her nature, she will have no more fertility to plant any of the seeds of her desires, and then humanity will absolutely be famished. Because it is the women who feed this world through the bounty, beauty, art, pleasure, and abundance she creates.

If we want to create new worlds and write new stories of life into being through our prophecy, we need to first cultivate healthy soil within ourselves for life to effortlessly bloom through us.

I create spaces where women are safe and held to do the deep regenerative life-changing work. Where you not only rise into your power as an oracle, but create the space for the prophecy of your soul to erupt through you. I create spaces where the map to birthing your dreams is unveiled, not designed by someone or something outside of you, but awakened through your body. I teach you how to make your life the richest, most moist, and juiciest fertilizer for things you previously couldn’t even imagine to take root and grow. There is SO much more, woman, but you have to become still enough to see.

You don’t have to drain yourself or work tirelessly to get your needs met. You don’t have to sacrifice or abandon yourself for your desires. This will depress, deplete, and extract from your life.

You simply have to learn how to garden like the goddess of life/death/regernation you were born to be.

Your creations are longing for you to create the space to hold them. They are waiting for you to come home to your nature to nurture them into being. But you have to choose to get off the survival hamster wheel and dive into the mystery where a great, fertile aliveness awaits. There, your dreams will be.

If you want to be held in the regeneration of your life and creation of your desires, the third annual cohort of The Art of Conjuring opens for enrollment next week (waitlist enrollment is open now). This space is an initiatory, transformational, intimate 6-month group journey. It is an active container of remembering and creation for women who are ready to widen their prophetic potential and consciously birth their visions into the world, igniting greater passion, purpose, joy, and pleasure as you walk in integrity with your truest expression as THE authority of your life.

This year’s journey feels big because the creations/lives women are being called to birth through them right now are big. But this container will guide, hold, and awaken you as you say yes to the greater life calling.

If you feel the call of the Great Mother into this space, I hope you answer it. Not just for you and your life, which will be radically transformed, but for the regeneration and vitality of the planet. You are needed.

With love,

Ashley River