My Journey from Separation and Fear to Belonging and Love
First of all, I’d like to acknowledge the Minyungbal and Arakwal people of Bundjalung country – the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and am writing this, and I pay my respects to their Elders past and present.
I was born at 30 weeks and was in an incubator for 5 weeks.
I believe that my Soul chose that beginning – of profound separation and terror – as part of my Calling to contribute to bringing more interconnectedness and love back into the world.
We often experience the precise opposite of what we’re here to do.
My early experiences brought an urgency to my callings to understand:
The impact of birth and separation on babies;
The profound importance of the mother-baby relationship and of holding for babies;
Our capacity to mend these early experiences, either as babies and children with Aware Parenting or later in life, as I did;
The disconnected domination culture, where separation for babies and young children is still the norm.
I was a Highly Sensitive Child, although of course, I didn’t know that term back then; I was also quiet and quite often scared.
So, when I first heard the term ‘psychology’ when I was 18, and I learnt that this was something I could study, I knew exactly what I wanted to do!
So, I studied a degree in psychology – at Royal Holloway College, a part of the University of London. The campus was like a castle, and in my third year, I lived in a turret room!
The Lady of Shallot has also been quite a theme in my life!
I LOVED university – I loved having so much autonomy, and the opportunity to deeply immerse myself in understanding more about the human psyche.
I studied hard, and also had lots of fun! I got a first, which I was so delighted about!
After that, I went to Cambridge University and did a Ph.D. on the mother-infant relationship in the context of postnatal depression.
Looking back now, I see the paradox of what I was doing.
I was based in one of the bastions of British Colonial history, Cambridge University, and yet I was spending every day with mothers and babies. It was there that I immersed myself in learning about the mother-baby relationship and it was from the mothers that I learnt about the cycle of intervention that often happens in hospitalised births – information that profoundly prepared me for my own birthing experiences nearly a decade later.
It was also in Cambridge, that one sunny day in 1992, looking around a little second-hand bookshop, that I came across The Continuum Concept – a book that profoundly affected the way I saw the world.
This combination of rigorous research alongside a passion for reclaiming more indigenous ways of birthing and mothering has been a mainstay of my journey. I always wanted to do things differently, and it’s only been in recent years, as I’ve understood colonisation and what I now call the disconnected domination culture, that I could see that thread going back to these earlier years!
Another part of my Ph.D. became deeply important in my later parenting and calling journey. I spent many hours watching the videos of mothers and babies interacting (that I’d videoed). Training in these observational skills became profoundly helpful in practising and understanding Aware Parenting, where observation is such a key element.
I was enjoying my Ph.D., but I knew that I wanted more.
I started looking around to also train in a therapeutic modality. The two I narrowed it down to were Family Therapy and Psychosynthesis Psychotherapy.
I still remember that day when the prospectus arrived from The Institute of Psychosynthesis, and I took it out of the envelope. I was in my room in Cambridge, sitting on my bed, and as I held the beautiful book in my hands, calligraphy on the front of the thick paper, I read the quote, “In every human being there is a special heaven whole and unbroken.”
As I continued to read inside, I knew that this was what I wanted to do.
A year or so earlier, I’d got into what was then called The New Age, and was learning all about meditation, perennial philosophy, spirituality, and had started weekly therapy, because I wanted to understand the effects of my past.
So, to learn that there was a form of psychology that was a ‘psychology of the soul,’ which deeply understood all the impacts of our birth and childhood, but also knew how to understand and integrate what I then called ’spiritual’ experiences, was music to my heart.
This deep and broad understanding of human beings was what I had been looking for.
And it was only later that I realised that I had already come across Psychosynthesis – I’d bought “What We May Be” from a bookshop on the campus of a University in Vancouver, Canada, in 1988.
My starting therapy at 22 was also another one of those moments that I’ll never forget! I was at The Cambridge Centre, the New Age Centre, and one of my friends was there, sitting on a chair by the window talking about the therapy session that she’d just had, and how she understood that what was going on with her boyfriend was related to her relationship with her Dad. I had the thought, “I want to understand myself like that too!”
I started with a Gestalt therapist for a year, and then had varieties of psychospiritual psychotherapies. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to have 10 years of therapy before I became a mother. I remember at the time, an acquaintance told me that he thought that meant I didn’t like myself very much. But it was the opposite, and I’m so grateful that I did that – having received so much listening for a decade was profoundly supportive when I became a mother.
So, I started the training at The Institute of Psychosynthesis, and trained there for four years, becoming the youngest person there to get certified as a psychotherapist. I then did another two years of postgraduate training.
That six years had a profound effect on my life, in so many ways and I’m so grateful to Roger and Joan Evans, who founded the Institute. Psychosynthesis gave me a profound context for developmental psychology which holds the Self, Love and Will at the centre.
I loved learning about subpersonalities, the journey of the Soul, dreamwork, group process work, the historical waves of psychology, transference and countertransference, spiritual emergence and emergencies and so much more.
I also met my first husband there, and it was such a powerful experience to go through the whole training together, with all the emotional processing that entailed.
Parallel with my psychotherapy training and developing a therapy practice, I continued in academia – in a very non-academic way!
I was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Exeter University, where I researched the cognitive capacity of babies.
Again, this was a lot of hanging out in maternity wards and with babies!
After that, I was a University Lecturer at The Centre for Complementary Health Studies at Exeter University, where I taught The Therapeutic Relationship to M.A. students.
So again, I was combining more traditional ways of knowing within a mainstream academic context!
At age 30, I felt a call – I had a dream of spending a year on a beach, after an intense decade!
I did spend a lot of that next year at the beach, as I moved to Australia – the land of my Mother’s birth!
My thirties were a process of putting into practice all that I’d learnt in my twenties, alongside learning modalities that have become the foundation of my world and work.
When I was 32, I was wanting to conceive a baby with my new partner (who became my second husband), but I was terrified of giving birth, despite all the therapy I’d done in my twenties, including modalities like rebirthing and Holotropic Breathwork.
I was Googling ‘fear in birth’ and lo and behold, I discovered this process called HypnoBirthing. Even more amazing, the first HypnobIrthing practitioner training in Australia was to be happening soon after.
I was wondering whether it was the thing for me to do, and the ink pen I was using suddenly spilt a load of ink on the page I was writing the details on. I turned the corner up and opened it up again, and there was a picture of a birthing woman! To me, that was a clear Message from Life!
I went and did the training, and it was a life-changing experience.
My core beliefs about birth completely changed. On the training, I also met Peter Jackson, who was then a HB practitioner. He told me about something called P.S.H. – Private Subconscious-mind Healing, which I trained in during my pregnancy. Yes, just weeks after the training, my then partner and I conceived our daughter.
By this time I was already no longer scared about giving birth.
During the pregnancy, which I prepared for in huge depth, I deepened into complete trust in my body and my baby, very clear early on that I wanted to have an unassisted birth.
I immersed myself full-time in learning everything I could about unassisted birth, and did all kinds of practices, receiving acupuncture and various other forms of bodywork, and diligently doing all the HB and P.S.H. meditations that I created. A midwife friend came to visit us from England, just a few weeks before I gave birth, and she said that she had never met a woman who was so prepared to give birth! That was such lovely recognition for me!
Lana was posterior, and the birth was 86 hours, and it was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had.
To go from someone who was terrified of giving birth, to less than a year later, to be deeply calm and centred during a long posterior birth, was really powerful.
I’m so grateful for the calm, lovely start that we had, and how resourced I felt in all ways, going into motherhood.
Whilst I was pregnant, I’d been looking for a parenting modality which would fit with all my academic work/understanding of attachment theory, with all my psychotherapy training and practice/pre and peri-natal psychology knowledge, and yet again, a search engine gave me the answer I was searching for.
When I found out about Aware Parenting, it was everything I’d been looking for, and more!
Here was this paradigm which fitted with all that I’d immersed myself in during my twenties, and it had all these extra pieces that I’d never even considered, such as the fact that babies can heal from any stressful or traumatic experiences, right from birth onwards. I went and bought The Aware Baby, and immersed myself in it!
We practiced all the other parts of Aware Parenting, except the listening to feelings part, until Lana was three months old.
Despite agreeing with all of The Aware Baby, and despite ALL the therapy I’d done, my own incubator baby experience meant that until then, I just didn’t have the capacity to listen to her feelings, and didn’t even think that she had any feelings to express! But I began to realise, from her behaviour, that she did have feelings, and that I was distracting her from them!
I so clearly remember the very first time her dad and I listened to her feelings. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.
I’d been feeding her all evening, as I always did, and then I stopped and held her in my arms, listening. After expressing a big chunk of feelings, she gazed into my eyes for about 15 minutes, with the presence of a Buddha, as a deep peace enveloped the whole room. (You can hear her dad and I talk about this in The Aware Parenting Podcast episode on Fathers part 2!)
Her dad and I listened to her feelings pretty much every day for the first three years of her life.
The reasons I wanted to practice Aware Parenting were to help her emotional wellbeing – to stay connected with her feelings, to release stress and tension, and to be relatively free from emotional suppression and dissociation.
Little did I know that Aware Parenting has a whole lot of other side effects. She was (and still is) profoundly present, calm and relaxed. Sleep was always easy and effortless. She was loving and connected. I came to see that so many of the things parents find challenging in parenting are because of unexpressed accumulated feelings. At 20, she is a deeply self-connected and self-directed young woman.
I read and re-read all of Aletha Solter’s books, and became an Aware Parenting Instructor when she was three, and started seeing clients – alongside still seeing HypnoBirthing and P.S.H. Clients.
By this time, I’d stopped working as a psychotherapist – I saw that creating change in a baby’s birth and parenting was a much earlier and easier way of supporting change!
When Lana was 9 months old, still fully immersed in Aware Parenting, I knew I was looking for something else.
That was the time I learnt about Elimination Communication – and started practicing it with her.
It was also, again when searching online, that I learnt about Nonviolent Communication.
That was another one of those profound moments of recognition, that here was something that I wanted to dive deep into and immerse myself in, which I did.
For the next few years, I read every book I could on NVC, went to lots of workshops, including a 9 day International Intensive with Marshall Rosenberg and others, and a 1 day workshop in London with him whilst we were visiting there. Almost every night, after Lana was asleep, I would spend time on the NVC parenting Yahoo group (anyone remember those, before Facebook?) practicing giving empathy!
I wrote articles on NVC in parenting, and ran workshops too.
I knew that Lana was learning how to think, and I wanted her to think in NVC, so I spoke Classical NVC to her, and she did think and speak in NVC, as did Sunny once he got older. I will always remember the story of when she was out with her dad at a cafe when she was about 3 or 4, and someone said to her, “you’re so beautiful!” And she said, “Do you mean I meet your need for beauty!?”
Learning NVC, I couldn’t believe that so many other paradigms didn’t understand the difference between thoughts and feelings, and how I could have done ALL the therapeutic work I had done without realising how many feeling words aren’t feelings at all, but are thoughts.
My understanding of the bigger picture of consciousness increased too, as I learnt about the Domination Culture from Marshall Rosenberg, and before him, Walter Wink, and from NVC how guilt is not an inbuilt feeling but a socially-constructed one. I also learnt to understand so much more about the needs for autonomy, and how much our culture is based on coercion and power-over.
I’m so incredibly grateful to Marshall Rosenberg, as NVC is such a core part of my worldview and work.
When Lana was three, I lost a baby at 12 weeks of gestation.
It was a profound and powerful experience, with my then-husband Michael there with me throughout – birthing the baby at home, and afterwards engaging in a beautiful ritual.
I remember coming home from acupuncture, whilst in the process of losing the baby, and the Eurythmics song came on; “It’s alright, baby’s coming back, and you won’t turn him around this time.”
We conceived Sunny three months later, and I took even more responsibility for my pregnancy and birthing this time.
I followed the Gowri Gentle Birth Method diet and herbs. I had recently trained with Peter Jackson in Calmbirth, and diligently listened to my own Calmbirth and P.S.H. meditations every day, did all kinds of bodywork and craniosacral therapy, and did all I could to make sure he wasn’t posterior as my daughter had been.
I’m so grateful that my Craniosacral therapist told me about The Lifting Technique by Janie McCoy King.
In my 41st week of pregnancy, we had been walking up to Byron Lighthouse every day. On Michael’s birthday, we saw a mama and baby whale up closer than I had ever seen before, or have ever seen since. The next day, I knew that I was ready and willing to give birth, and prepared myself and the space.
My best friend came over to look after Lana, and Michael supported me.
I knew that, despite all that I’d done to aim to prevent posterior positioning, Sunny was still posterior, so I used The Lifting Technique.
With each surge, I lifted underneath my belly, so that the angle of his body was pressing on my cervix instead of my backbone. The beginning of the surge was uncomfortable, but as soon as I lifted, I was completely comfortable.
(I learnt afterwards that if I’d kept on lifting throughout, I wouldn’t have even had that initial discomfort).
Just as Janie McCoy King says of The Lifting Technique, it was a really quick birth – 90 minutes. Quite different to Lana’s 86 hours!
He turned, I had another surge, and he jumped out into his father’s arms in the bathroom. It had been a fully free birthing experience and I felt so profoundly powerful. A couple of days later, we weighed him, and he was quite a big baby, which added to my sense of superwomanness!
I am so incredibly grateful that I’d already been practicing Aware Parenting for all those years and had already been an Aware Parenting Instructor for a while –
– because when I put him to my breast after he was born to feed, he clamped down heavily and it was really painful. I knew from my very different experience with Lana that this was jaw tension from his quick posterior birth.
So, along with having a CranioSacral visit the next day, I also listened to his feelings on the first day of his life.
After each time I held him in my arms and listened to his feelings about his birth, his latching on was more relaxed, until, after three feelings sessions, his jaw was lovely and relaxed and feeding him was completely comfortable.
If he had been my first baby, I wouldn’t have understood what was going on, and there’s no way I would have been able to listen to his feelings from that early on.
I also had so much more understanding of how many feelings babies have and was determined that I wouldn’t give him a breastfeeding repression process as I had given Lana, so I really diligently distinguished between his needs for nourishment and his needs for expression, and listened to way more feelings than I did with Lana.
Although Lana was incredibly aware, calm, relaxed, gentle, cooperative, and could concentrate for hours, I could tell the difference that my increased capacity to understand babies and listen to feelings had on Sunny. His face was luminescent as if his essence and light literally shone out of him.
He was like her, deeply calm, relaxed and present, whilst also being profoundly curious and interested in the world.
Lana was by then four and a half, and completely in love with her little brother.
Their Dad and I practicing Aware Parenting with them meant that they stayed deeply connected with their innate lovingness and they were both profoundly in love with each other for the first 5 years of his life.
With Sunny, we started with Elimination Communication from when he was a newborn, which was a very different experience from starting at 9 months with Lana.
I loved how much extra information it gave me about his needs and his cues.
We also did sign language with him, as we had done with Lana, and again, I loved the way that it helped us be able to understand their needs and feelings even more clearly.
Michael had trained as a Montessori teacher, and I had become passionate about it, so I made and bought lots of Montessori materials and had, from when Lana was a baby, set up The Prepared Environment and had loved giving everything a home where she could access everything.
I LOVE Montessori, and particularly the respect it has for a child’s autonomy and self-direction.
With Lana, we did a lot of Montessori activities and also workbooks and she really thrived with that approach.
I’d known since she was a baby that I wanted to ‘homeschool’
(as it’s often called here in Australia) and during their 20 years, we’ve played with all different varieties of that!
Sunny didn’t ever enjoy workbooks much and has learnt much more through natural learning.
Over the 20 years of ‘ homeschooling’, I’ve completely deschooled and de-disconnected domination cultured myself around learning and now, I deeply trust children’s natural capacity and willingness to learn everything that they need to learn.
As the years have gone on and my ddc-free lens has become clearer, I’ve become even more passionate about trusting children, and my feelings and thoughts in relation to school and the education system have become clearer and stronger.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but it’s so clear to me now, that so much of what I had been drawn to in pregnancy, birth and parenting were more indigenous ways of being.
I was deeply connected with my body during conception, pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.
The free birthing, the co-sleeping, the baby carrying, the Elimination Communication, the natural learning, the NVC, are all more indigenous ways of being, and we all thrived on them.
The next big learning for me came about when I was searching ‘deja vu’ online when I was pregnant with Sunny.
My dad had experienced many deja vu experiences, and as he was in his later years, I wanted to find something that would support him in his experiences.
I found out about The Field Project, which is a consciousness-as-cause model.
It was the next paradigm and practice that I dived deeply into and I’m so grateful for Philip Golabuk’s work.
Since being a child, my dad’s stories had helped me be really interested in synchronicity, deja vu and consciousness, and I had explored that in various ways in my twenties, but The Field Project work helped me understand how to work with all of these in even deeper ways.
I trained with them, did every course and call I could with them over the next few years, including Aligned Parenting, and became a Field Project Certified Facilitator.
Then, something really big happened that had a profound impact on us all, and that was when the father of my children and I separated in 2010.
This came on top of my dad dying in 2008 and me falling out with my (male) mentor.
The person most affected was Sunny, who was four at the time. He went from the most present, aware, gentle boy, to hitting and headbutting from the feelings of powerlessness he was feeling.
That was the next chapter of my Aware Parenting journey. Up until then, parenting had been relatively easy for me. But here I was, in my own really big feelings, also aiming to support our son with all that he was going through.
I knew how to practice attachment play and offer loving limits in response to aggression, but my own feelings of powerlessness and loss meant that there were lots of times that I didn’t respond in those ways, and it had a big impact on our daughter.
However, it did profoundly deepen my compassion for all parents and helped me be a more understanding Aware Parenting Instructor. I knew how deeply difficult parenting could be in times of great challenge.
It was a couple of years before we came out the other side of that painful time, as we all adjusted to our new lives.
My focus after that was on our natural learning lifestyle, and I also started developing my own work as well as running Aware Parenting groups.
I started a ‘Love Being a Mother’ local group, which I really enjoyed, and that spread to offering Aware Parenting, Aligned Parenting and Love Being a Mother groups and workshops in Sydney and Melbourne. My lovelies would stay with their dad and sibling-mother and the twins, who had since come along, whilst I went away for long weekends.
I also became a Level Two Aware Parenting Instructor –
which meant that people could come to a 6-hour workshop with me, and that would count towards their certification requirements towards becoming an Aware Parenting Instructor themselves.
In 2014, I had a really strong calling to create an online course.
I wrote my Love Being a Mother Course, and then was looking everywhere to try to understand exactly how I could create the course!
I had a big rollerblading accident which very powerfully showed me that it was safe to go fast and dangerous to have too-big brakes, and I took that Message from Life to heart.
I’m so grateful that a dear friend told me about Jana Kingsford. I signed up for Jana’s Launch a Little Course in October 2014, and started the next phase of my life – as a passionate online course creator! In that first couple of years, I got up 2 hours before my children every morning and created a course a month.
Within a few years, I had created about 25 courses!
For so many years, I had felt frustrated and had been wanting to share more with more people, and creating online courses met so many needs for me!
I loved that I was doing what I loved, following my calling, making a living, and supporting my children to do what they loved too!
I also loved the design process of creating websites and quote cards – remember that love of drawing as a child? – those needs got met here!
I continued to develop my own work.
Whilst my first few courses were Aware Parenting ones, I developed my ideas with each new course. Whilst running my Love Being a Mother Course, the Inner Loving Mother and Inner Loving Father came to me, which became the Inner Loving Presence work.
I made the Attachment Play Course, and after that, my Aware Parenting Instructor Mentoring Course, which was a dream come true. For several years, I’d seen people wanting more support in becoming Aware Parenting Instructors, so I was delighted to create that offering for them in 2015.
I was particularly focusing on the parenting aspect of parenting, and yet, I began to see a theme. So many of the parents (who were mostly mothers) I was connecting with around Aware Parenting were so diligently meeting their children’s needs, listening to their feelings, and avoiding punishment, shame and coercion, and yet I saw that they were responding to themselves in very different ways – often ignoring their needs, judging their feelings, and punishing themselves with harsh thinking, shaming, guilt and coercion.
I realised that I wanted to create offerings that would not only help them with their parenting but at the same time, would support them in reparenting themselves and their younger parts in the ways they were parenting their children.
My Living Aware Parenting Course was one of those courses that particularly attended to that. As were my guilt courses, such as my Get Free From Guilt for Good Course.
In creating my Power and Powerlessness in Parenting Course, the Power Portal Process arrived, which later became the Inner Loving Presence Process. The Power and Powerlessness Course also helped me deepen my understanding of Will.
I had felt a really strong desire and calling to develop a therapeutic process, and here it was, coming to me as I created each offering.
You’ll probably hear me quote Rumi a lot: “You must ask for what you really want.”
In my own entrepreneurial journey, I began to deeply understand the psychospiritual process of following our calling.
In the first couple of years of online course creation, I experienced so much powerlessness with technical hitches and glitches, I coerced myself into taking action, and younger parts of me with old fears showed up.
I began to see how the practices and processes I was developing could not only be used in psychospiriritual development, parenting and reparenting, but were also profoundly helpful in the journey of responding to our calling.
With this increasing consciousness, I created Respond Lovingly to Your Calling, The Inner Loving Presence Process for Entrepreneurs and the Psychospiritual Entrepreneurship Immersion.
The more I worked with clients, created courses, and offered FB lives, the more my own paradigm and practices came together.
By this time, I realised that there were three key elements based on practices and processes to my paradigm:
Love:
The Inner Loving Presences –
(Inner Loving Mother, Inner Loving Father, Inner Best Friend and Inner Beloved) –
As we connect with our Inner Loving Presences, our old inner dialogue and inner self-relationship that we internalised growing up in the family and culture that we grew up in, become transformed to deeply loving and encouraging relationships, which also profoundly affect our outer relationships and experiences. We become willing to be more loving and receive more love, and Life responds to our willingness.
The Inner Loving Presence Process –
This is where we revisit and hearing younger parts of us with our Inner Loving Presences, and offer reparative experiences, so that old hurts get heard and mended and so Life doesn’t need to keep presenting the same themes to us again and again;
Conversations with Life:
We are deeply interconnected with all of Life, and Life is constantly communicating with us, through signs and symptoms and synchronicities. As we develop a more friendly inner dialogue, we also experience more and more that Life loves us and wants to support us in doing and having what we Love. But Life responds to our willingness and identity, including what we keep putting up with, not to what we want or wish we had. We increasingly understand how to be a conscious participant in the Conversation with Life.
Will:
The Will and Willingness Work and Practice –
This became clearer as I created The Wonder of Willingness Course and is all about understanding our true nature as Will and Willingness; our true power and where we connect with the Life force of the Universe. Here we connect with what we want and are willing for, and what we are not willing for, including our powerful NEO NO, and how all of Life responds to our Willingness and Not Willingness.
I loved seeing how my understanding of will and willingness came together from so many of the people I’d learnt from:
The concept of Love and Will from Psychosynthesis;
From Aware Parenting, the importance of needs for autonomy, and how unmet needs for autonomy lead to a lack of cooperation, and a need to express frustration and powerlessness through raging and tantrums;
From NVC, coercion and the domination culture, more about needs for autonomy, and the powerful phrase, “are you willing?” (for years, there was a joke in our family that this particular phrase was used a million times a day, along with the word, “enjoyable”!)
How Life responds to our willingness and not-willingness from The Field Project work.
Much earlier on, I’d developed the term, “Loving Limits”, and to this I now added, “Loving Encouragement” and the NEO NO – all powerful combinations of Love and Will.
Jana, who had since become a dear friend, told me that the word ’Psychospiritual’ kept popping out to her from my posts, and that was when I realised that all of this fitted within a psychospiritual perspective, which I’d been holding since I first came across Psychosynthesis whilst I was visiting Canada in 1988.
Psychospiritual Parenting and ReParenting then became clear.
When I combined all of these together, the Psychospiritual model of parenting, reparenting and development started to take shape even more.
I offered my first Marion Method Immersion in January 2018, and the model and methods keep emerging, not only in parenting, but in reparenting, and also in our individual and cultural development and entrepreneurship (responding to our callings).
Over the past few years, many people have asked how they can certify in using these practices and processes, which is where the idea for the Marion Method Mentoring Training came about. The first MMMT happened in 2021, and there is now an MMMT each year.
I started been learning more about decolonisation, and have learnt so much from ‘The Patterning Instinct’ by Jeremy Lent.
Whereas I used to simply focus on the relationships between parents and children, as the years go by, I increasingly see the bigger cultural and historical picture.
I love to share how I see current issues in terms of this psychospiritual paradigm, and I am most passionate about helping people get free from disconnected domination culture conditioning.
The disconnected domination culture is a term I created to describe this culture that began 3.5k years ago (according to Lent), first based on disconnection, followed by domination.
I believe that us getting free from ddc conditioning is vital, in order for the ddc to fall away. Love, true power and Life are all more powerful than the ddc.
So whilst I still love working with mothers and others who resonate with this paradigm and love applying the practices and processes to all aspects of their lives, I also love sharing my thoughts around the current world situation.
I love that this work is very big picture, both historically and globally, but also has very tangible and practical processes which can be used in everyday situations in all aspects of our lives, both internally and externally.
In 2019, Lael Stone and I created The Aware Parenting Podcast, which has since become very popular. Lael stopped co-hosting in early 2023.
The podcast has nearly 3 million listens.
In 2022 I became the Regional Coordinator for Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia, which means that people in these countries are certified by me.
Books became my focus after that, a long-term dream of mine!
I co-authored Raising Resilient and Compassionate Children with Lael Stone, published in Dec 2022. It became a bestseller in many categories.
My next book, The Emotional Life of Babies, came out in 2023, and I’m Here and I’m Listening was published in early 2024, both also bestsellers.
My next book, Sound Sleep and Secure Attachment with Aware Parenting, is coming out later in 2024, along with the first in my series of Aware Parenting children’s books, called Calm Down, Bob, Before Bed!
After that, there’s a book on reparenting coming!
I’m so grateful to all the people, practices and paradigms I’ve learnt from, and am so in love with this work.
When I reflect back on my life journey so far,
I also see the profound changes we can make in a lifetime, as we develop a personality that is a much more accurate reflection of our Soul.
Where I used to have a deeply harsh inner dialogue, now my inner dialogue is deeply compassionate.
Where I used to feel deeply alone and alienated, now I feel deeply connected with others, with so many of the parts of me, and with all of Life.
Where I used to feel terrified and afraid, I now feel deeply spacious in my body, relaxed and at ease.
Where I used to feel afraid to speak, now I love to share my voice.
Where I used to feel full of guilt, now I no longer feel guilty.
Where I used to feel alone with my feelings, I now have a deep sense of Inner Loving Presences with me when I feel any kinds of feelings, and I experience so much support from friends and colleagues and Life.
Where I used to feel weighed down by unexpressed grief, I now feel an abiding sense of joy and wonder.
I wake up every morning and connect in with my Inner Loving Presences, and then with what I want and what I’m willing for that day. Starting my day with my Lovingness and Willingness practices has profoundly changed my life.
I believe that we are capable of so much and that our Souls call us forward in every stage of our lives, to be more who we really are, to be more connected with the Lovingness and Willingness that is our true nature, and to feel a deep sense of interconnectedness and innate power.
Thank you so much for reading this, and for your interest in this work.
