Welcome to Under a Fig Tree! My name is Gabriela.
I’m a Spanish-Welsh writer, poet, mythologist, ritualist, and scholar of ancient religion. My work moves between two primary ways of knowing:
the scholarly study of religion, animism, and prehistory
and the lived, embodied realm of ritual, imagination, direct sense experience, and altered states of consciousness.
I give equal weight to scholarship and to the somatic, symbolic, and experiential modes of understanding that once shaped human life. Here, I explore how these older meaning-making systems — the mythic, animistic, and imaginal — can help us navigate the personal and collective complexities of our time.
My search for meaning beyond what my own modern industrial culture could offer began in my early twenties. It first led me to live with Jain renunciant nuns in their desert temple in Rajasthan, and later into an apprenticeship with a shaman in Peru. Over the years, I met elders of different paths: mystics, philosophers, healers, and ascetics. I travelled to traditional cultures and ancient sites, following what I intuited to be the remnants of a once-universal worldview that held ecological, social, and personal life in sacred coherence.
Having also encountered my share of new-age distortions, charlatanism, and spiritual abuse, I learned to marry a scholarly approach to my spiritual search to ensure rigour, depth, and groundedness in a wellness field that can easily become more harmful than healing.
Alongside this Substack publication, I teach through online courses, conferences, guest lectures, and in-person gatherings (Full list of academic qualifications).
My first non-fiction books are forthcoming with Shambhala Publications and Editorial Kairos, and some of my poetry has appeared in Clarion Magazine.
To find out more about me and my work, you can visit my website.
What is this publication?
I share two kinds of writing here:
A free monthly essay & poem on the first Sunday of the month
For the paid community, weekly Sunday essays with audio recordings of me reading them to you
This Substack serves as the main archive of my work — a living record of my research, field notes, mythic explorations, and imaginal inquiries; and a platform where all new writing is sent directly to your inbox.
** The title of this publication is in memoriam to my great-grandmother’s fig tree in Spain under which, as C. S. Lewis would put it, my imagination was first baptised.
