Beauty Without an Agenda: The Inner World Mirror

(Companion to “Healing the Shadow of Stolen Land” - Peace in the Outer World Essay)
By Dr Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne, Magical Farm Tasmania)

The Mirror Turns Inward

For years, I have tended to the outer world, in the soil, the garden, the policy room and public spaces. I knew, theoretically, the importance of the inner world, but never gave myself the time to go deep, not in a true, embodied sense. But now I understand: the way I treat my own body is the way I treat the Earth.

Echinecia - a symbol of balance, peace, patience, moderation, inner calm, perspective, tranquility, harmonious relationships in Magical Farm. Photography by Ness Vandebourgh Photography

Biodynamic practice has been both a signal and a breaking point, revealing the limits of the old way, the burnout of doing without being. It has cracked me open to feel grief, to meet the shadow, and to descend into the inner world where regeneration truly begins. When I move through yoga or Pilates, I’m not striving to improve; I’m learning to inhabit. My body is my first ecosystem, a landscape of weather, soil, and song.

This is what I call beauty without an agenda, the act of moving, creating, or resting not for an outcome but for aliveness itself. It is the essence of Con Viv, to live with life, to participate once more in its living conversation.

The Inner Landscape of Regeneration

Carl Jung taught that healing requires the courage to meet the shadow, the parts of ourselves we deny or overextend. I have often lived in the shadow of the giver: pouring out vision and care until depletion whispered its quiet warning. Jung reminds me that what we do not integrate within will return to us through the outer world.

Rudolf Steiner would see this as an imbalance between the etheric and astral bodies: too much outward giving, not enough inward renewal. He speaks of the need for ‘rhythm’: day and night, work and rest, giving and receiving. Regeneration depends on that sacred breathing of life.

Tyson Yunkaporta would describe this as a “pattern distortion” a break in reciprocity between self and Country. When we move without listening, we step out of pattern. His custodial law asks us to live in right relation, to act as participants in the story of place rather than its authors.

And Joanna Macy offers a way back: her Work That Reconnects transforms burnout and despair into action through gratitude, grief, perception, and practice. She teaches that our pain for the world is proof of our belonging and that thread that reweaves us into community.

The Healing of Over-Doing

Many of us who care deeply for the world have forgotten to include ourselves in the circle of care. We overwork the soul as we have overworked the soil - the industrial and modern pattern is entrenched and the redesign requires us to break that pattern. The medicine and pattern we need in life is greater care and gentleness and part of this revolution is simply just to rest. Beauty without an agenda is how the overextended spirit learns to breathe again. It reminds me that the feminine act of receiving is not passivity, it is participation in the flow of creation.

The Embodied Commons

Our bodies are not private possessions; they are commons - microcosms of the planet itself. When one person slows down, the field shifts - as we are all part of an interconnected life system. When one person moves with grace, the world feels it, ah, how I need to remind myself of this again and again. In the language of our four teachers, this is the crossroads where the inner and outer worlds meet:

• Jung’s integration of the shadow.

• Steiner’s spiritual ecology.

• Yunkaporta’s relational custodianship.

• Macy’s collective awakening.

Together, they teach that the Earth feels through us, that every act of awareness in the body is a small awakening in the world.

The Voice of the Body - Chiron in Taurus, Activated by Aries

In my birth chart, Chiron, the Wounded Healer, rests in Taurus in the third house, the realm of communication and connection. It teaches healing through the ‘Beauty Way’: through embodied language and sensory wisdom. Yet as I write, transiting Chiron moves through Aries, lighting up my second house of self-worth and resources. Together, these transits open a deep dialogue between value and voice, how I speak, what I create, and what I believe myself worthy to receive.

For much of my teenage and adult life, I sought peace through words, by explaining, convincing, or teaching. The ‘education’ system took me out of my body and told me it was my mind that needed to navigate. But my heart and Chiron keeps guiding me back to something simpler: that the most profound communication is not spoken, but lived. I am now remembering myself as a child, in my garden, in nature, in my imagination and quite the introvert. This is my happy place. 

Taurus teaches that words are most powerful when they are rooted in the body, when the throat, heart, and hands speak together. Every breath, every gesture, every act of care becomes a form of language the world understands. This is the healing of my Chiron wound: learning that true communication is not persuasion, it is presence. And Aries’ fire now reminds me that self-worth is not a concept, it is a practice of being here, fully alive, in one’s own embodied authority.

Yarrow - The Plant of Integration, Presence and Initiation

At my front doorstep and throughout the farm, Yarrow grows freely, one of the first plants to greet visitors, one of the last to fade. She is both delicate and indestructible, soft and strong and a child of Venus and Chiron, and thus a true teacher of the Beauty Way.

Yarrow reminds me what embodied communication looks like in nature. She doesn’t speak, she radiates. In summer, I watch beetles and bees land upon her umbels; she receives them with grace and gives nourishment in return. I love watching this and feel so fulfilled that I have given so much life to the land and all of these beautiful living creatures. 

Yarrow on Magical Farm Symbol of integration, new beginnings, creative sparks, finding new passion, starting something, potential, talent … Photography by Ness Vandebourgh Photography

Yarrow, rooted in poor soil, thrives not through lack but through inner sufficiency and her ability to integrate what is around her and alchemise it into nourishment. Oh Yarrow, you beauty. She embodies the principle that Steiner called “etheric intelligence”: the plant’s capacity to mediate between Earth and cosmos and matter and meaning. Through Yarrow, I learn that true healing is about integration, being okay with complexity and ‘letting it be’. Like her, I am learning to root deeply, receive openly, and give back simply by being fully alive. Yarrow is my daily reminder that beauty without an agenda is enough.

Yarrow at Magical Farm’s Herb Drying Cob House by Ness Vandebourgh Photography

Praxis: Returning to Rhythm

At Magical Farm Tasmania, we practice this integration every week. Our Thursday Landcare gatherings begin in stillness, noticing our breath, our bodies, and the land’s quiet pulse before we touch the soil. In my body practice that I share in community which is called YoFence, the fusion of sword and yoga, we embody balance: the sword for boundary, the breath for belonging. Strength and softness meet as a new kind of dialogue, one where courage and compassion co-exist.

In January 2026, our YoFence Immersion at Urdara will offer seven days of this embodied communication: seven days of courage, conviction, and connection lived through the body as a prayer for the planet. 

The Inner World Mirror

Jung teaches: integrate. 

Steiner whispers: balance.

Yunkaporta reminds: relate.

Macy calls: reconnect.

And Yarrow, growing at my door, simply “is”. Together they form a mandala of inner peace that radiates outward. When we come home to our own embodiment, we are no longer separate from the world we wish to heal.

Conclusion - Living Beauty

Beauty without an agenda is the quiet revolution of our time. To move, rest, or create for no reason other than the joy of being alive is to align with the regenerative intelligence of Earth herself. When I inhabit my body as sacred ground, the land recognises me and in that recognition: soft, wordless, whole, peace begins again.

“When I speak through my body, the Earth understands.”

— Dr Demeter

The Wound, the Third, and the Healer: A Virgo New Moon Reflection

Under this Virgo New Moon, as the world turns its gaze toward conflict and complexity in the Middle East, we are invited into a quieter, deeper listening. Beyond political positions or media cycles, a deeper symbolic story is unfolding, one that asks not for sides, but for soul. One that asks us to become not louder, but more whole.

Virgo is the priestess of Earth, the keeper of the detail, the weaver of fragmented things. Her medicine is found in tending, in ritual, in what has been overlooked. It is fitting, then, that this New Moon arrives with the presence of Raphael, archangel of healing, the guide of breath, clarity, and the sacred ‘middle’ way. Together, they call us not to solve what is beyond us, but to participate differently: with presence, humility, and care.

This reflection offers seven symbolic threads, drawn from Jungian depth psychology, planetary wisdom, and current world events, that seek not to explain the Israel-Palestine conflict, but to witness it and to examine the psychic landscape surrounding it.

1. The Earth Priestess and the Forgotten Wound

Virgo teaches that healing begins in the small, the practical, the real. She is not a sign of abstraction, but of embodiment. She reminds us that care is political, and that repair starts in the soil, of land, of body, of psyche. This is a moment when a wound, long suppressed and twisted has erupted again in collective awareness. Not only in Israel and Palestine, but in each of us. It is the wound of disconnection: from one another, from nature, from the sacred, from history, and from paradox.

2. Raphael and the Element of Breath

Raphael, whose name means “God heals”, is associated with the element of Air, the realm of thought, language, and breath. In the flood of commentary and ideological fervour, we are reminded to return to breath, to clarity of heart, to the healing power of stillness. Raphael does not arrive with punishment or triumph. He arrives beside the wounded, offering presence. He calls us back to relationship and attentiveness to the other. His presence blesses those who walk toward complexity, not away from it.

3. The Wound as Portal

The land called holy is now a site of unbearable trauma. Each people involved carries a deep ancestral scar: exile, displacement, occupation and genocide. These are not historical footnotes, they are living psychic facts and each side believes its suffering is not seen. From a Jungian lens, this is the domain of Chiron, the Wounded Healer. The one who cannot heal himself but can, through his own suffering, guide others to healing. In this conflict, we see shared pain unacknowledged, so instead of becoming medicine, the wound becomes a weapon. But Chiron’s teaching is clear: the wound is the place where the light enters, if we can hold it long enough to learn.

4. The Loss of the Third

Jung warned of what happens when the psyche splits into opposites with no reconciling force: we lose the Third and the middle space collapses, and this is where that glue and connection of dialogue becomes impossible. Each side demonises the other and public discourse now reflects this binary psychosis. In symbolic terms, the Third is not a compromise, rather it is a sacred space where opposites meet and something new is born. It is the alchemical vessel, the fertile void, the room of imagination. Virgo’s gift is to restore this space through ritual, through exactness, through attention to what is real and alive. The Third may not yet exist as a shared political solution and the ground between remains scorched by history and division. But it must begin as a psycho-spiritual space within us, where paradox can be held and new possibilities imagined beyond the reflex of sides.

5. Projection and the Global Mirror

This conflict has become a projection screen for collective shadow. For some, it evokes unacknowledged guilt (from the Holocaust and from colonial histories); for others, suppressed rage or inherited trauma. People do not only respond to the conflict itself, they respond to what it touches in them. Jung called this “complex activation”: when an outer event triggers inner unresolved material within the human. This is why the discourse is so charged and so reactive. We are not speaking only of Israel or Palestine, we are speaking of ourselves, without knowing it. Discernment is Virgo’s core gift and is the medicine here. What part of this is mine? What am I projecting? What grief am I avoiding by becoming righteous?  Yes, this conflict touches something deep in me, my own grief, guilt, and longing for justice. I share these reflections not from a place of certainty, but as part of my own process of reckoning and return.

6. The Silenced Anima

In the deeper layers of our collective psyche, the Anima: the soulful, feminine energy of grief, care, and connection, has been pushed aside. What we see instead is a flood of harshness: arguments, ideologies, and certainty that leaves no room for feeling. But the Anima hasn’t disappeared and she lives in the cries of grieving mothers, in the silence of mourning, in the deep longing for peace.

Virgo, connected to this quiet, healing force, reminds us that real healing isn’t fast or loud. It’s slow, grounded, and tender and found in presence, in tending the land, in prayer, and in care. She gently asks us: What beauty will you choose to serve, even in the face of pain?

7. Becoming the Healer

Important work in this whole space is becoming part of a field where the psyche can begin to recollect itself. Where the story doesn’t collapse into sides and grief can be shared. To become the healer in this moment means to become a sanctuary. To hold paradox without flinching and to stop feeding the binary. The speak the beauty way into the broken field is a sacred act of healing inwards and outwards.

The number seven, echoing through this moon and this reflection, is the number of completeness, mystery, and cosmic rhythm. Seven days of the week. Seven chakras. Seven classical planets. Seven colours of the rainbow. Seven wounds of Christ. Seven biodynamic preparations. Seven times we fall and seven times we rise. It is the number of soulful return.

🌿 Closing Plant Allies: Yarrow & Rosemary

Let us close with two herbal essences that may help us anchor this reflection in the body and breath.

• Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is the plant of integration and boundary, sacred to Chiron, the Wounded Healer. It holds the paradox: it heals both wounds and walls. Named after Achilles, who was both warrior and healer, yarrow knows how to bind what has been broken, to hold the line without hardening the heart. Its essence supports us in holding contradiction, in weaving together what has been torn apart, within and without. You can purchase our beautiful essence at the Magical Farm Apothecary.

• Rosemary is for remembrance and clarity and it clears the fog, brings warmth to the heart, and helps us honour what must not be forgotten. Rosemary essence supports right remembering, not of sides, but of soul, of life, of what we are here to protect. You can purchase this essence at the Magical Farm Apothecary.

Together, they offer a way to move through this time: with integration, memory, and sacred attention. May we hold paradox bravely, walk with discernment, devotion, and soul.
This is the call of Virgo.
This is the blessing of Raphael.
This is the healing path forward.