As The Empress and Wolf team prepares to celebrate another birthday for its founder, Elicia, we want to celebrate the woman whose life, experiences, and relentless curiosity have shaped the space it has become.
Elicia is no stranger to adversity. Her childhood was not an easy one, home was not always the safe and nurturing place a child needs it to be, and much of the care she received came from her grandmother. At school, things were difficult too. She was frequently removed from class, yet no one seemed to stop and ask why or to look deeper. She found little understanding from the adults around her around what she needed or what was happening beneath the surface.
For much of her life, Elicia carried the feeling that there was something about herself and the world that she simply hadn't figured out yet. School did not work for her, but that never meant she wasn't capable of learning. When something captured her curiosity, she could become deeply disciplined and immersed in it. She discovered that she could educate herself in ways that traditional education never had. Learning became something she pursued on her own terms. And she has pursued it relentlessly ever since.
For years, Elicia explored both inner and outer worlds. She travelled extensively the world, deliberately seeking experiences and diverse destinations. She has always been someone who wants to understand things deeply, to turn them over, question them, experience them and find out what they might have to teach her. Her self directed studies have taken her across the landscapes of tarot, numerology, astrology, channeling, mediumship, quantum physics, manifestation, psychology, personal development and countless other approaches to understanding ourselves and the world around us. Some paths stayed with her and others didn't but she learned from all of them. In many ways, Elicia was becoming the healer she had needed when she was younger.
Eventually, that journey brought her to Daylesford, where she settled and helped her mother run an art gallery. Then, in 2015, something happened that would change the direction of her life. She had a dream. In it, she saw a healing space of her own and a place that would be transformational for the people who entered it. A space where people could come as they were, explore themselves, learn, heal and leave feeling a little more connected to who they really were. The Empress and Wolf was born from that vision.
As with so many things in Elicia's life, the dream did not arrive without a fight. The early years of The Empress and Wolf were challenging in ways that would test anyone. While pregnant with her first child, Elicia found herself going to court against her own mother. It was an extraordinarily difficult beginning for a business that had been born from a dream of healing and transformation. Yet through it all Elicia kept moving forward. The business grew and so did she. Every experience became an invitation to learn more about herself, about other people and about the ways that life can shape us. But there was another lesson still to come, and it was the hardest of her life.
One of the painful consequences of growing up with unhealthy relationships is that what is familiar can become confused with what is normal. When manipulation, neglect or unhealthy dynamics are part of your earliest experiences, it isn't always easy to recognise the red flags when they appear later in life. Sometimes, the very things that should feel alarming can feel strangely and even comfortingly familiar. Elicia didn't understand that at the time.
She eventually found herself in an abusive marriage, followed by a brutal divorce and years spent in and out of the family law system. It was one of the darkest and most difficult chapters of her life. But it also took her deeper into the work of understanding herself than she had ever gone before.
During this period, Elicia was diagnosed with Autism, ADHD, and PTSD. For the first time, pieces of her life that had never quite made sense began to come together. Her difficulties at school, always feeling different, her intense interests, the way she learned, the naive and trusting way she had experienced the world and the lifelong sense that she was trying to understand a language everyone else seemed to speak instinctively.
These diagnoses didn't suddenly explain everything, and they didn't erase the difficult experiences she had lived through. But they gave her a new understanding of herself with more compassion and far less blame.
Today, Elicia is a survivor of domestic violence, a single mother, a neurodivergent woman and a business owner. But none of those labels on their own tell the whole story. What perhaps says the most about Elicia is that after everything she has experienced, she still wants to learn and understand. She still believes people are capable of growth and transformation, and she still wants to create something meaningful from the experiences she has been given.
That is at the heart of The Empress and Wolf. The dream is bigger than a shop. Elicia wants it to be the kind of space she once needed herself, somewhere people don't have to pretend, perform or make themselves smaller to fit into somebody else's expectations. A place where curiosity is encouraged, where people can explore who they are outside of unconscious habits and the stories they tell themselves. A place where unconventional paths are allowed. A place where personal growth isn't about becoming someone else, but about becoming more authentically yourself. And a place where people can find resources, knowledge and the courage to live a life that feels true to them.
Looking back, there is a beautiful symmetry in Elicia's journey. The little girl who wasn't understood grew into a woman determined to understand. The child who struggled within a system that didn't know how to see her became a woman who spends her life helping others see themselves more clearly. The child who once needed a safe space went on to create one.
The journey has not been easy and it has definitely not been linear. There have been heartbreaks, battles, mistakes, discoveries, reinventions and more than a few occasions where just continuing to face each day needed an unimaginable amount of courage.
But Elicia has never stopped learning from it. This the real story behind The Empress and Wolf. It wasn't created by someone who had life all figured out. It was created by someone who spent a lifetime searching for answers, questioning what she had been taught, learning from experience, and slowly piecing together an understanding of herself. And then she took everything she had learned and built a place where other people could do the same.
As Elicia approaches another birthday, there is so much to celebrate together. So let's celebrate the privilege of learning. The potential for growing. The ability to question and look deeper. The joy of creating, regardless of what others think about it. And, above all, let's celebrate a woman who is still choosing to turn the most difficult parts of her journey into a light that might help someone else find their way.
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