September 2025: Ancient Understandings of Justice – The Dreaming/Tjukurrpa – The Dreaming is the very essence of Australian Aboriginal beliefs about creation, spiritual and physical existence. By its indigenous names Tjukurrpa (Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara) or Ngarranggarni (Gija), the Dreaming is “everywhen” – a continuous, living reality that encompasses the past, present, and future simultaneously. Law is not a separate, human-made construct imposed upon society, it is an intrinsic and inseparable manifestation of the Dreaming itself. Read more on Substack here.
August 2025: Ancient Understandings of Justice – MA’AT – The ways our far-ancient ancestors related to justice was from a place that was so much deeper and truer and real than we can fathom now. They were not experiencing the separation that characterises our times. In those times when the natural world, the skies and the stars, and the great mystery of the Divine were inextricably interwoven with day-to-day life, the stories and symbols that were (and still often are) associated with justice can provide many clues for those of us thirsty for a strong, new and enriching philosophy and path in Law. Read more on Substack here.
July 2025: A foot in each world (giving birth to sacred creation in Law) – I say this because I realise I have always felt this foot in two worlds in my work, my vocation, that which deeply interests me. In the law but perhaps more specifically in the context of working in corporate offices, skyscrapers, high pressure environments, environments where discipline, efficiency, productivity, detail and precision are praised and rewarded. And in the mystical, the space where all of it becomes undone, where “I” can enter deeply into my own inner landscape and its never-ending richness, where I can feel my own soul and let it nourish and sustain me deeply. Read more on Substack here.
July 2025: In Honour of the Throat Chakra – What I am feeling and discovering about this Feminine Spiritual path is that we don’t have much control over what wants to come up and out. Those writing through the lens of, on behalf of, the Feminine rarely (never!) sit down with a pre-formulated plan of what to write or with a process of logically planning and thinking through the beginning, middle and end. What wants to be written usually speaks itself through us and at times what wants to be said simply needs to be released so that the next layer can be seen and felt. A process of releasing and stripping away.Read more on Substack here.
July 2025: Polarity to Unity (Mind-led to Heart-led) – Our human-made systems of law and control are in a constant battle with the darker aspect of those energies – either reacting to them or repressing them2. Wanting the lighter end of the pole by all means. Our religions are the same. WE are the same, please show me only my light, please let others only see my light. Our task is to open to, and embrace, ALL of those energies – from the darkest to the brightest, from the darkest lunar light to the brightest solar illumination. Easier said than done. And yet, life will continue to bring us into contact with all that is dark in us if we can continue to meet it.Read more on Substack here.
February 2025: Linear Time Curse in Legal Practice – One of the greatest liberations I am sensing around the way we have been practising law is in our relationship with time. Those of us in touch with our deep natures, with our deep roots, with our feminine senses – that have or are working within our legal systems – have likely felt the curse of the clock or the billable unit! We have sensed deep in our core the contraction from being enslaved to this rigid and linear perception of time – especially in relationship to the expansive, often heart-centred, field of justice. Read more on Substack here.
February 2025: Justice-Keepers – It is important to remember that, in the deepest sense, we were lawyers before we entered the legal system. And I say this because most of us that did end up working in law have a strong resonance with justice, with fairness, with balance. We had this desire, this deep feeling, that we wanted to advocate for some person, or community, or the earth, or a place. We wanted to stand up for the vulnerable, the less well-off. We went into law with those sincere desires and that is, in fact, what makes us lawyers and practitioners of justice in the deepest sense. Therefore, if we choose to step out of the system, we are still lawyers, we are still justice-keepers. This vocation still wants us and needs us. Read more on Substack here.
February 2025: The Grid and the Web – We speak a lot nowadays about being between two worlds, two epochs, two stages of evolution, and that we are in the process of a quantum leap. But, if that is the case, the body must take the journey with us. And, at least it feels to me, our bodies want to fully process and integrate and understand where we are travelling from. Like someone that is packing up to move house, or move country, the process is easier when we fully accept and appreciate where we have been (and all the gifts it’s given us). And in that way there is a value in the body stepping back and forth, back and forth, feeling into, accepting fully where we are now AND sensing into, inviting, tasting where we are moving towards. Really letting our cells feel these realities. Read more on Substack here.
January 2025: Waves of Awakening in Law – I was feeling into these pulsating movements of awakening we have been travelling with in law this past decade and more, and these words came. I hope you can feel and resonate with the feelings of this journey we are on. It feels like all of these waves are moving and pulsing at the same time, and that now we are breaking through into a new deeply exciting and profound one… And yet now we can begin to feel the tendrils of another wave breaking through, making itself known to many of us, asking what we will discover when we take the journey ourselves into the root of our own bodies and energetic wombs Read more on Substack here.
January 2025: The “Phallacy” of Big Law – The journey of my feminine body through a career in law has been a journey through the types of landscapes and environments we see below. That is, the landscape of “Big Law”, those large corporate law firms based in the large skyscrapers of big city financial districts. A landscape that has “magic circles” and “silver circles” of prestigious, multinational, corporate firms earning billion pound (and dollar) revenues every year. It has been a journey of walking into sleek reception areas with polished floors, getting elevators up 9, 10, 11 and more floors, and working in an atmosphere of (often) frenzied mind activity with constant deadlines and pressure in the air. Read more on Substack here.
December 2024: The Sacred Feminine and the Law – What about the Masculine? – My dad’s mother was the first deeply rooted woman I knew. There is a running joke in our family that I always thought she was part African, so unlike other typical Irish grannies she was. She had a deep voice, sallow skin, tight curls and she wore these long floor-length exotic kaftans (I never saw her dressed in anything else). She was also incredibly generous, loved to take a nip of brandy (at any time of the day) and smoke elegant cigars. She had a sensuality and confidence about her that was rare.Read more on Substack here.
December 2024: The Sacred Feminine and the Law – How do you feel in your body about being able to work with the realm of law and justice within a broader, more expansive perception of time? And how would it feel in your body to work in the realm of law and justice with a broader, more expansive perception of intelligence? And how would it feel in your body to work in the realm of law and justice with a broader, more expansive perception of the tools we can use? And how would it feel to work in the realm of law and justice with a broader, more expansive perception of what the ultimate authority for our laws and justice is?Read more on Substack here.
September 2024: Law, Being-in-the-World, and more – A small but simple practice at the beginning of every one of these calls stood out to me. Everyone (whether 8 people or 35 people) had the opportunity to briefly introduce themselves starting with locating themselves in time and space i.e. where exactly are you and what are you doing right now? The message (at least I felt) being – please don’t launch into your CV/resume, let us feel who and where you are as a human being on the planet. The message (at least I felt) being – please don’t launch into your CV/resume, let us feel who and where you are as a human being on the planet. Read more on Substack here.
September 2024: Why Queen’s Counsel? – Feeling into what the vast realm of “Law” is – rather than thinking about it in the disconnected, cold, logical manner we have been trained – is such a different experience. We know only what rules are, mind-made law, we have no idea anymore what true Law is – the Law that deeply recognises our interconnectedness with each other, all beings around us, the cosmos, the past and the future. Read more on Substack here.
July 2024: Listening to how the Body experiences Law – This enquiry into law is inextricably tied up with our deeper body consciousness. Anything that I genuinely want to say on this topic comes from undercurrents within the body, not the mind. If I try “to think” of topics to write on either I can’t or it fails. This has been the case since the beginning. And this is the antithesis to the legal brain. Read more on Substack here.
January 2023: The Fruits of Deep Embodiment – I was revisiting this question posed at a workshop I attended last year: “What would you gain as a feeling in your body if you had $5million?” (insert whatever sizable figure or currency — or maybe whatever other desirable outcome — works best for you). The workshop was exploring deep themes of feminine power and leadership (this can be regardless of gender), and particularly our relationships with money. Read more on Medium here.
November 2022: Natural Law — from within to without – Eventhough the endeavour of making law and practicing law is a natural and ancient one for human beings, it feels as though we have been engaging in it for a very long time in a way that is unnatural. Law is just about structure – the external structures in our world, societies, and communities that hold everything together, that help us co-exist peacefully and thrive together. None of us can fully flow and blossom without the right structures to contain, hold and direct us. Read more on Medium here. (image by Kristen Palana, http://www.kpalana.com)
November 2022: Love in the Legal System — the archetype of the all-compassionate mother – If the deepest love permeated our legal and governance systems what would that look like? Taking the example of someone that has committed the worst type of crime (which is often the question that comes up when we bring up this type of philosophical discussion) what would happen? How would that person be treated? For me, this is a good place to begin. Because we must go to the deepest parts of our own being to answer the question. Read more on Medium here.
November 2022: Protecting Data or Honouring Information – Instead of Data Protection, could we speak about ‘Honouring Information’? Instead of Controllers and Processors, could we speak about ‘Information Guardians’? Instead of Data Subjects, could we speak about ‘Information Sharers’ (or why not just use the word People)? Could we imagine building data protection type laws, or any law, from a mutual starting foundation of: “We trust each other, we respect each other, we honour each other”? Read more on Medium here.
October 2022: Our Hearts and Feelings Connect Us — Let Them Lead in Law – When I was working in insurance law, I used to have to scroll through reports of tragic global events everyday. These events —like the worst airline crashes, major weather catastrophes or terrorist attacks — are important headline news because they cause the largest financial losses for the industry. Over time, what unsettled me most about this task was not the feeling of upset and distress about the events themselves but noticing, on the contrary, that I could easily read these reports without feeling anything at all. Read more on Medium here.
October 2022: The Wisdom of Innocence – It made me think of the adult and child, and in many ways this is an apt analogy for our legal structures as they sit within the rest of society. They, as the adult, ‘know’ far more than the child, they set the boundaries and the limits, they are in charge, and they enforce the rules when the child attempts to break them. This structure is of course vital to the child’s development and, in healthy situations, the child will thrive. Read more on Medium here.
September 2022: It’s All the One Field – A conversation I had yesterday reoriented me again to perceiving life and law holistically, and highlighted how easy it is, despite our deepest knowing and best intentions, for the mind to split reality in two. I was in the process of making a decision about whether or not to take on certain work, and was gesturing to mainstream legal work over here with the one hand, and to more conscious or spiritual legal work over here with the other. Read more on Medium here.
September 2022: Embodying the Spirit of Law – How can we stay in contact with aspirational qualities like justice, fairness, truth, wisdom, peace when we are working with the law? Embody them? Prioritise them? It feels like many sincere lawyers already do this naturally but not in a deliberate and explicit enough way. Our laws originate from a person or a group that embodies these aspirational qualities, and that holds a vision for a better, fairer way of doing things. Read more on Medium here.
September 2022: Timeless Law?– In legal practice most of us are prisoners of linear time and embedded in a framework of six minute units, billable hours, calendar appointments, court deadlines, and limitation periods. An inevitable effect of this is contraction of the body and the mind. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are almost constantly in a state of unnatural tension checking the calendar and watching the clock. I remember the first time I was introduced to the concept of time-keeping and six minute units in the commercial law office I was working at. I gawped. Read more on Medium here.
September 2022: The Value of Chaos – Mothering — as in the act of caring for children, family members, friends, neighbours, pets by anybody — brings us into contact with the chaos of the world. It can feel very uncomfortable. Like that chaos that we had kept carefully and competently under wraps increasingly comes loose and escapes into the outer world for all to see. She can show herself in the form of cancelled appointments, messy hair, tears for no reason, expired tax discs, overgrown grass, unmade beds — to list just a few of the thousands of ways chaos displays her face in our manicured world. Read more on Medium here.
September 2022: We need more “Legal Owls” – Animal symbology can have great power. Even in our modern world, we use symbols and animals to represent our businesses and lives — though the deeper meaning of these symbols may remain unconscious. We commonly hear the term “legal eagles” but what does this mean, and where did it come from? Pausing and considering the question can give us clues about our perceptions of what a modern lawyer is, and the ways we are subtly and unconsciously continually emphasising and prioritising certain qualities over others. Read more on Medium here.
December 2022: The Light beneath the Law – Who knows what our legal systems will look like in fifty and more years. Up until recently, because we have been oriented from the outside-in, we have mostly needed powerful and highly structured institutions and rules to guide and instruct us on what was right and wrong. You could both include law and religion here. It feels as though now we are dramatically re-orienting to living from the inside-out, and becoming more awake to inner sources of power and agency. Read more on Medium here.
August 2020: Book Review ‘The Inner Work of Racial Justice – Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness’ – I approached the reading of this book with some apprehension about whether or not I would have enough life experience and understanding to truly resonate with, and understand, its central theme let alone be able to write an informed book review. I recognised, at the same time, that this resistance suggested it was a project I should undertake and I am glad I did. For the first half of my life I have understood, or perhaps chosen to understand, the subject of racism in a simplistic way – deliberate acts of bias against people of a different race or colour. Click here to read more.
August 2020: Interview with Rhonda V. Magee, a trailblazer in the field of integrating contemplative practice with legal education and law practice. Her recently published book, ‘The Inner Work of Racial Justice – Healing Ourselves and Our Communities Through Mindfulness’ invites us into a challenging but deeply transformative personal journey on understanding race and racism as they exist in contemporary society. The book is available at time when these issues are flaming up around the world, and seeking recognition and healing, more than ever. Magee’s book is a great place to start or to deepen any journey of understanding. Click here to read more.
August 2020: Feature ‘A Design for Justice – The Courtroom of the Future’ – Between September and December 2018, students of the Amsterdam Law School (UvA) and Architectural Design students of the Rietveld Academy engaged in a collaborative project that involved challenging the current structures of the criminal courtroom and developing design concepts for the ideal space for justice. Thirteen innovative, inspired and thought-provoking designs were created. Click here to read more.
September 2018: Book Review ‘The Desire for Mutual Recognition – Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self’ – In ‘The Desire for Mutual Recognition’, Gabel attempts to unravel, in a spiritually aware yet deeply grounded way, the knots of why this apparently most natural of states is so rare for human beings today and why its re-emergence is critical. For the legal community, the book in its entirety is well worth reading for an understanding of the wider social vision within which law gains its meaning. Chapters 5 and 7 however deal particularly with how the book’s main thesis manifests within the field of law. Click here to read more.
September 2018: Interview with Peter Gabel – My first experiences of inter-being and deep human connection came through the movements of my youth in “the sixties”, through experiencing the joy in the rising of those movements. To me, at that time, that was a political phenomenon, not a spiritual one. I recognise, in hindsight, that it was, of course, spiritual. Through my subsequent relationship to Rabbi Michael Lerner, I began to attend Jewish High Holiday Services in the Jewish Renewal Movement. We engaged in dancing, singing, movement, evocation, and prayer – intentional ways of being together. Click here to read more.
December 2017: Interview with Polly Higgins, internationally renowned Earth Lawyer, who began her career as a lawyer in London (called to the Bar 1998) where she was a barrister specialising in corporate and employment law. Her training began firstly in the criminal courts, and subsequently expanding into a civil law practise. It was only after she asked herself “how do we create a legal duty of care for the Earth?” that Polly turned her attentions full-time to examine what law is required. Click here to read more.
May 2017: Book Review ‘Transforming Justice, Lawyers and the Practice of Law’ – If I had an understanding before that law needs to change and that that change is already happening, this book has helped that understanding become a conviction. The book reinforces the message that our society is undergoing a shift in consciousness from an experiential sense of innate separateness to one of innate togetherness, that scientific evidence is available to prove the validity of this shift, and that our cultural institutions – law being one of the most essential – need to join with and support this shift rather than resist and hold it back. Click here to read more.
December 2016: Book Review ‘The Ecology of Law – Towards a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community’ – This book by law professor and activist, Ugo Mattei and physicist and philosopher, Fritof Capra describes how at the root of many of the environmental, economic, and social crises we face today is a legal system based on an obsolete world-view. By incorporating concepts from modern science, the authors explain that “the law can become an integral part of bringing about a better world, rather than facilitating its destruction“. Click here to read more.
November 2016 Interview with J. Kim Wright, a US lawyer and a founding pioneer of the expanding Integrative Law Movement, a movement that can be described in many ways including, in Kim’s own words: “an international movement that responds to the challenges of law practice with creative, innovative solutions. It blends the human and the analytical. The approach spans personal and systemic change. Integrative lawyers are purpose-oriented, that is, they have a clear sense of their own purpose and the purpose of law. Click here to read more.
October 2015 Feature ‘Integrating Mindfulness and Law’ Meditation retreats for lawyers are still relatively rare on this side of the world however in the US they are more common. In May 2015, I was able to travel over to New York to attend an inaugural Mindful Lawyering retreat on the East Coast of America run by the Berkeley Initiative for Mindfulness in Law (Berkeley Law School being the first law school in the US to implement a mindfulness curriculum). Click here to read more.
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