There are conversations that do not move in straight lines. They spiral. They circle the same sacred wound from different directions until, somewhere between the spoken sentence and the breath after it, a deeper truth appears.
When Kait Tregenza sits down with Sadie Bess on Becoming Flame, the conversation begins with death, but not in the way our culture usually speaks of death. Not as an ending to be feared, sanitised or pushed into the private room. Not as tragedy alone. Not as the final interruption.
Instead, death becomes a teacher.
“I think what I’m hearing from you,” Kait says, “is that you’ve had this incredible capacity to guide yourself, and other people through these continual endings in life so that they can end a chapter and start anew.”
This is the doorway into Sadie’s work: endings that are not only physical, but psychic, emotional, ancestral, sexual. The endings that happen while we are still breathing. The death of an old self. The death of an old story. The death of an identity that once protected us and now keeps us trapped.
“In the age that we’re living in,” Kait observes, “we do get to continue to live evolutions beyond our death. So we don’t have to physically die.”
And yet, we are rarely taught how to end. We are rarely taught how to consciously release a life, a relationship, a belief system, a version of self, before collapse does it for us.
So many women know this intimately. One day, we wake up and realise we are no longer the woman everyone around us still believes us to be. “Others keep thinking you’re the same around you,” Kait says, “but you’re like, I'm completely new. I'm completely different.”
There is a particular loneliness in this. The woman who has changed must often keep introducing herself to people committed to remembering her as she was.
Sadie understands this. Her work has moved through death, grief, ancestry, sensuality and sexual alchemy, but what threads it all together is the art of transformation. Not transformation as a wellness aesthetic. Transformation as fire. As loss. As the terrifying, necessary skill of building “on the ashes, the rubble, the destruction of what was gone.”
“Sexuality, our sexual energy, is our creative energy,” Sadie says. “We have to let go of old parts of ourselves to make room for the new to emerge. And oftentimes we have no idea what that’s going to look like. And it’s very scary.”
This is the sentence that penetrates any woman who has ever outgrown her life. She knows the fear and excitement of the unknown self. What happens if I let go of this part of me? What happens if I leave the identity that made me acceptable? What happens if I stop wanting what I was told to want? What happens if the life I have built was built around a version of me who no longer exists?
Sadie names the old self clearly: “They are an attachment. They are a comfort zone. They are what we’ve been told we’re supposed to want, what we’re supposed to do, what is supposed to be important.”
To push back on that can mean losing more than an idea. It can mean losing relationships. Careers. Communities. Approval. The familiar architecture of belonging.
But beyond that loss, Sadie insists, is something more alive.
“It’s really magical and ultimately enlivening,” she says. “The total rebirth in a brand new thing and ultimately more love and happiness and greater connection and deeper connection. Real truth is what lies beyond that.”
This is not a casual promise. It is not the shiny optimism of self-help. Sadie is honest: transitions need support. They require tools. And, above all, they require permission.
“We have to give ourselves permission to go through this and to let go,” she says, “and appreciate that maybe not everybody will be on board.”
There it is: the unspoken tax of becoming.
Not everybody will be on board.
Not everybody will understand why the woman who once stayed now leaves. Why the woman who once pleased now says no. Why the woman who once over-functioned now rests. Why the woman who once lived from obligation now chooses desire.
But the more painful question is not whether others approve. It is, as Sadie asks, “How much of ourselves are we going to continue to give away?”
Eventually, staying closed becomes more painful than opening. Sadie reaches for a line she half-remembers, circling the essence of Anaïs Nin: the day came when remaining tight in the bud became more painful than blooming.
“That’s it,” Sadie says. “It just gets so uncomfortable being stuck in that. And once you start seeing it, then it gets really uncomfortable.”
This is the ache of awakening. Before consciousness, we may be unhappy, but we do not yet understand our own participation in the pattern. Once we see it, the old life becomes unbearable. The excuses thin. The body speaks louder. The soul refuses to be quieted.
“We will almost force destruction,” Sadie says. “We will self-destruct just because part of us knows that’s what’s absolutely necessary.”
This is where the conversation turns towards the goddess of destruction.
Kait remembers being young, travelling through Buddhist and Hindu countries, standing in temples, confused by the celebration of a goddess who could be both destruction and creation. “I was like, no,” she says, “you either have destruction or creation.”
But the feminine mysteries have always known better. The womb knows. The bleed knows. The seasons know. The snake knows. To create, something must be released. To bloom, something must break open. To be reborn, something must die.
Sadie speaks of the goddess of destruction not as cruel, but as loving.
“She’s helping us to see because we can’t move on to the next thing. We can’t open and blossom until we destroy that old version, that old part. So she’s actually really loving because you don’t want to stay trapped in that.”
This is a radical reframing for women taught to fear destruction. We are trained to preserve, maintain, smooth, repair, hold. To keep the family together. Keep the business running. Keep the face composed. Keep the body desirable. Keep the peace, even when the peace is killing us.
But some structures are not meant to be preserved. Some identities are not meant to be maintained. Some relationships are not meant to be stretched into eternity simply because they once held love.
The question becomes: can we learn to die before catastrophe?
Kait asks it plainly. “How can we learn to die a little bit every day, or a lot every day, like shed completely every day, so that it doesn’t have to get to this point of absolute pain?”
Sadie’s answer is not dramatic. It is disciplined.
“It’s continued self-reflection,” she says. “It’s continued questioning of ourselves. It’s continued awareness and looking at where am I ready to go?”
Even the dream can expire. Even the job that once liberated us can become too small. Even the relationship that once healed us can begin to constrain us. Sadie speaks to this with tenderness: “Maybe this was my dream job for a while and I learned so much and now it’s time for me to move on to the next thing that’s going to support even more growth and even more expansion.”
This is a sophisticated spiritual maturity: to not make the ending wrong. To understand that outgrowing something does not mean it failed. It may have served its purpose perfectly. It may have been sacred for a season.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Sadie says, laughing softly. “The only constant is change.”
For women in the Phenxx world — women who are building companies, families, bodies of work, erotic lives, inner temples — this is both confronting and liberating. We do not arrive once. We arrive, expand, outgrow, release, grieve, create and arrive again.
The utopia, Sadie suggests, does not hold forever. “I don’t think we’re ever going to be in that utopia for too long. We might hit there for a while, but then we outgrow that utopia. And there is nothing wrong with that.”
There is nothing wrong with that.
Perhaps every ambitious, soulful, exhausted woman should write this on the mirror.
There is nothing wrong with outgrowing what once saved you.
There is nothing wrong with wanting more after receiving what you prayed for.
There is nothing wrong with changing again.
The work is to listen earlier. To feel “the shift coming”. To notice when something “needs to move”. To stop pretending misalignment is gratitude.
“If we’ve been on this path and we have gotten into alignment,” Sadie says, “we know when we’re starting to feel out of alignment.”
This knowing lives in the body.
And so the conversation deepens into Sadie’s sexual alchemy work — the part of her practice that understands desire not as indulgence, but as creative intelligence.
Kait asks about creating from the feminine, from the body, from receptivity rather than exhaustion. “Every woman,” she says, “is like, I want to move into my feminine and create from there and have this life. And I’m so exhausted from pushing and hustling and this grind masculine culture that I don’t want to be in. But also I need to have some earthly things fall into place like food on the table, bills paid.”
It is the modern feminine paradox, exquisitely named.
How do we trust divine timing and still pay rent? How do we stop forcing without becoming passive? How do we create from pleasure in a world that rewards urgency? How do we let go of grind culture when survival still requires action?
Sadie does not pretend it is simple.
“For me, it has been quite a journey,” she says. “I’ve had to let go of a lot of things. There’s things that I really wanted, things that I’d put so much effort into and it just seemed like the right thing. And I was forcing and forcing and doing all the things.”
She speaks of the familiar online-business prescriptions: grow the list, build the platform, do the outreach, follow the breadcrumbs other people promise will lead to success. “There are so many things we’re told this is what’s going to support the path,” she says.
But the body knows when strategy becomes self-abandonment.
Sadie began asking: “Am I moving from a place that’s actually fully aligned and heart-based, or is it fear-based? Because I’m going to miss out if I don’t do this?”
Fear can be extremely productive. Fear can build empires. Fear can make a woman look impressive while quietly disconnecting her from her own soul.
Sadie recognised the fear beneath the doing: “That’s acting for me from a place of fear that the universe isn’t going to provide, that things aren’t going to be taken care of, that the next right thing isn’t going to show up.”
So she let things fall away.
“I went through a period where I just let go of absolutely everything,” she says. “I was doing all these YouTube videos. I was doing all this outreach, all these things. And I just had to drop all of it and let things fall away and then see what naturally starts to come back in of its own without me having to chase it.”
She is quick to add: “I will not say that is easy.”
Of course it is not easy. For a woman raised inside achievement culture, letting go can feel like death. To stop forcing can feel irresponsible. To trust can feel naïve. To wait can feel dangerous. To receive can feel almost impossible.
And yet, this too is alchemy.
Not the alchemy of collapse, but the alchemy of surrender. The death of urgency. The death of performance. The death of the woman who believes she must chase what is meant for her.
Kait reflects this back to her: “You’re so trained in letting go, in allowing things to die, in moving into the death space as where you create from, as where your alchemy is.”
Sadie receives this with visible recognition. “Thank you so much for saying that,” she says. “That one was really painful. I really just didn’t understand. And some of the stuff that we go through that we lose that falls away, it just doesn’t make any sense. Like, why shouldn’t this be the perfect thing?”
The ancient question returns: why?
“Why, why, why,” Kait says, connecting this moment back to the beginning of the conversation, to grief, death and loss. “People going through a deep grief, and all they want to know is why. Why did this happen to me?”
Sadie agrees. No matter how long we have walked the path, the why still comes. But it no longer has to swallow us.
“We get more confident and we trust the process more and more,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean it’s just easy.”
There is no bypassing. Sadie names that too. “You can’t just jump to the end. There’s a reason all of these things are happening. There’s a reason for the transformation. There’s a reason for the death.”
This is essential. Spiritual maturity does not mean skipping grief because we trust the outcome. It means allowing grief while holding a wider perspective. It means being able to say, simultaneously: this hurts, and I trust. I am confused, and I am held. I do not know what is coming, and I know this ending is not meaningless.
“We’re living at these different levels all the time,” Sadie says. “We can have this higher perspective and like, yeah, everything’s great and I totally trust it. And there’s also this other part of us that’s just confused and why.”
The difference is that we do not get lost there anymore.
“We allow ourselves to grieve,” she says. “We allow ourselves to feel the pain. We allow ourselves to question and say, what in the heck, guys? What is this one? But I have this, so I’m not lost in it.”
This is perhaps one of the most generous teachings of the conversation. The evolved woman is not the woman who never grieves. She is not the woman who never asks why. She is not the woman who floats above heartbreak in linen, declaring everything divine while her body remains unwept.
She is the woman who can descend and return. The woman who can feel without drowning. The woman who can grieve without making grief her god.
And then comes the body.
Kait asks Sadie about the difference between living in the head, the fear, the heart and the pelvis. What does it mean, in sexual alchemy, to live from the pelvis?
Sadie begins at the root.
“It’s great to start in your pelvic region to really ground down into our bodies,” she says, “because so much of our sexuality and sexual expression has been up in our heads, or disconnected from our bodies entirely.”
For women, this disconnection is rarely accidental. It is cultural. Historical. Religious. Familial. Sometimes traumatic. We have inherited generations of shame around the sensual body, the desiring body, the bleeding body, the ageing body, the loud body, the body that says no, the body that says more.
Sadie describes the pelvic region as a place where we may hold “tension, fear, trauma, whatever we’re holding in our bodies in that area, because we hold a lot of trauma and numbness and shutdown and anger and grief and rage and so much restriction.”
The practice begins with attention. Place awareness there. Notice what is stuck. Notice sensation. Notice lack of sensation. Do not rush to fix. Do not perform awakening. Listen.
“Really,” Sadie says, “that’s just the base where we need to start.”
From there, the work is not to remain only in sexual energy, but to connect it with the heart. She speaks of breathwork practices that intentionally connect the pelvic region with the heart, allowing sexual energy to flow with emotional connection.
“Because that’s ultimately what it is,” she says. “It’s connecting with the other, coming into unity.”
This is where sexual alchemy becomes devotional. It is not sex as performance, seduction or conquest. It is the return of split-off parts of self. Pelvis and heart. Desire and love. Body and spirit. Feminine and masculine. Self and other. Human and divine.
Kait names the medicine of this embodiment personally. As a “triple air sign”, she says her desire to be in her body was learned, not innate. “The life that I’m living from a deep connection to my body compared to as a walking head is infinitely better,” she reflects. “There is nothing that can be created and sustained that doesn’t come through the body.”
This line could be carved into the doorway of the new feminine era.
Nothing can be created and sustained that does not come through the body.
Not a business. Not a love. Not a family. Not a movement. Not a future worth inhabiting.
And so, when Kait speaks of “sexualising my life”, she is not speaking of spectacle. She is speaking of creation from “a foundation of true desire, pleasure and joy” and mapping that to why we are here.
Sadie agrees: “We can’t do it and then bring it in. That’s what you’re here for.”
The conversation ends, as all good initiations should, with ritual.
A new year is approaching. Kait asks Sadie for a ceremony, an exercise, a way to welcome new energies. Sadie offers something simple, beautiful and precise: a candle ritual.
“The candle, when we light it, serves two purposes,” she says. “The flame burns away the old and it illuminates the new.”
Write the intentions. What are you leaving behind? What are you welcoming in? What do you want to more fully align with? Take an oil — frankincense, perhaps, or whatever speaks to you — and rub it into the candle. Place the energy of release into it. Place the energy of invitation into it. Light the flame. Let it burn.
“It’s a really important tool for the grief process, for any sort of transition,” Sadie says. “Really bringing in actual ritual and a physical thing to connect with and do. It’s very powerful.”
Because the body needs ceremony. The psyche needs symbols. The soul needs moments when we say: this is ending now. This mattered. I release it. I welcome what comes next.
In the end, Sadie Bess does not offer us a clean map. She offers something far more useful: permission to be in process. Permission to grieve. Permission to change again. Permission to outgrow the life that once felt like liberation. Permission to stop chasing what drains us. Permission to listen to the pelvis, the heart, the flame.
A woman who knows how to let the old self die is not easily controlled.
She can no longer be kept inside inherited scripts. She no longer mistakes comfort for truth. She no longer worships the life she has outgrown simply because it took effort to build. She can burn what must be burned. She can bless what must be released. She can open before she is forced open.
And when the world asks her to remain recognisable, she can smile and say, with all the sensual authority of a woman reborn:
It is nice to meet you.
