Hello!
I’m listening to Katy Perry’s ROAR as I write this LONG post.
It has three parts: jealousy sweet spots, my son’s birthday, and my son’s birth. The birth part is for you if you are planning on having another baby.
PART ONE – JEALOUSY SWEET SPOTS.
I’ve been feeling LOADS of jealousy lately…. soooo much of it. And all to do with people sharing their gifts with the world.
Have you ever had that happen?
Usually I say that jealousy points us to what we’re wanting, but I kept on listening to what I wanted, and the jealousy just got BIGGER.
I had a conversation with my #Beliefsister Jana Kingsford, and went in the bath and listened.
And I suddenly realised. This ISN’T ABOUT NOW> this is a sweet spot!
Millions of times (well, a lot of times), I’ve listened to sadness sweet spots, grief sweet spots, fear sweet spots, terror sweet spots, rage sweet spots, but somehow I just didn’t think of jealousy as being from the past as well as the present.
I did a whole handful of Inner Loving Presence Processes.
I went back to that moment when I was 16 and my then ‘best-friend’ went off with my first boyfriend and went out with him for two years, sharing all the details with me. My Inner Loving Crew stood with me there, in that sixth form common room, remembering every detail from the black squishy chairs, to my 80’s clothes and hairstyle.
I went back to the birthday party I had where the boy I had a huge crush on and who had been encouraging me, showed up with another girl.
I also went back to nine year old me, teenage me, and a more recent me.
And on each occasion, the jealousy turned to rage and then outrage.
I expressed IT ALL to them in that moment.
And when I listened to their response, one of them tried to say sorry, and the 16 year old me said, “Sorry doesn’t mean ANYTHING.” I wanted them to hear my OUTRAGE. And they did.
And my Inner Loving Crew were there.
My Inner Loving Mother loved my rage and outrage unconditionally.
My Inner Loving Father told them, “I won’t let you treat her this way.”
My Inner Best Friend told me, “They don’t deserve you.”
My Inner Beloved stood by me with his unconditional presence.
And it was powerful. WOW!
Then I went to share with Jana all about it, and we had a really POWERFUL conversation where she really MET me in that outrage!!!!
(Someone recently said that I didn’t seem to need an Outer Loving Crew, because I have my Inner Loving Crew. And I realised that I haven’t been clear. The MORE I have my ILC with me, the MORE I am willing to ask for support from my Outer Loving Crew. They work together IN TANDEM!)
The rage turned to laughing out loud joy, wonder and excitement as she helped me get clear on a whole lot of stuff.
I’m here to help mothers get free from the hoax that our culture can impose on us.
The hoax that we are not powerful
We ARE powerful.
We powerful beyond belief.
Our culture judges us, belittles us, pours shame and guilt on us when we’re little, and then we do it to ourselves.
I’m here to help mothers get free from all that internalised dialogue.
To heal from all those hurts that come from judgment, being told at school that we weren’t good at this or that, or to have our art work given a C, or being shamed for who we are.
And as I am writing this, the song ‘Roar’ changes to ‘Firework’. I hadn’t ever seen the video for this before,
We are each a FIREWORK, a spark of divine light, here to shine and be the unique soul that we are.
We get dimmed by pain and hurt and protection and judgment, and then we continue to dim ourselves.
(like that story of elephants, who if they are tied by a piece of rope to a stake when they are little, will stay in one place as adults if they have a piece of rope tied around their leg, even if the rope is not tied to anything else.)
But as we listen to our hurts, change that internalised dialogue, and do more of what we love, that spark can shine more brightly again.
You are a firework.
You are beautiful.
I’ve been singing that a lot lately too! I invite you to watch this and sing along with it!
I’m here to help us get free from the shackles of self-judgment, find our Inner Loving Crew and our Outer Loving Crew, and fall in love with our lives.
PART TWO – MY SON’S BIRTHDAY
On Sunday it was my son’s 11th birthday.
We tend to have quite small birthdays, with just a few friends coming along.
But this year, the three children he wanted to invite were all away.
So it was just family.
This year, I decided I would do everything I could to minimalise stuff and doing things, so I could basically give him Present Time all day.
And so I did that.
I also have dropped all the things that would take my presence away on previous birthdays.
I didn’t care about how the house looked. I bought him his dream cake (a profiterole stack) and we had sushi – at his request.
I bought him just a very few presents; but things I knew he’d love.
I didn’t take photos when he was opening presents.
The way the day panned out, my daughter and their Dad and the rest of their blended family didn’t come over until midday.
Usually we would wait to open presents until they came. This time he just opened them when he wanted to, with me, and then my Mum.
He and my Mum and me played Mastermind – a game that she gave him for his birthday.
When the rest of the family came, we went to the beach and I went and got the sushi.
And he and I played together. I swang him around; we swang around together, we basically played rough and tumble games for ages.
And I felt so in love with him.
So connected.
Then we had the profiterole cake, and he was literally jumping up and down with enjoyment as he watched the sparklers sparkle!
And then he and I watched a movie together that night – “Cars”.
I did all I could to resource myself and simplify so I could give him my full presence all day.
And I loved it so much.
And he loved it too.
PART THREE – MY SON’S BIRTH.
This part is for you if you’re intending on having another baby!
And before I write any more, I want to say that our birthing experiences are so unique.
I also want to send out unconditional love and empathy if you have had birthing experiences that didn’t go the way you wanted.
If your birthing experience was emotionally painful, I am sending you loving compassion. I hope you get lots of opportunities for healing from the experience – having your feelings, needs and words expressed. Having your Inner Loving Crew there, being your advocates. Getting to do it another way in your own consciousness.
Healing from your birthing experiences also helps your child.
In the last few weeks, I’ve spoken to two mothers, who, when they did another chunk of healing of their own birthing, it led to big healing for their children too.
So here’s my story (which I’m sharing after seeing that signpost and message from Life; “your story changes lives.”)
For me, the most self-connected way was to birth unassisted.
I knew that I am deeply affected by the presence of others, and the only way I could truly and deeply listen to my body and my baby 100% was to free birth.
What I’m passionate about is for EACH WOMAN to listen to her own unique preferences around birth; her own unique way that will help her be MOST self-connected and MOST relaxed, and most connected to her baby. (If I could double underline this, I would!)
We are incredibly powerful as women, and our culture has also created a hoax that we are not.
Listening to ourselves and our own UNIQUE birthing preferences is SO important, I believe, for us to connect to our own unique power.
My children’s births were the most empowering and amazing experiences of my life.
When I was 23, I thought I had too much emotional pain to have children.
So I consciously spent the next 10 years doing a whole lot of healing around my own hurts so that I would be ready to be a mother.
And because I did a Ph.D. on the mother-infant relationship, I visited a lot of mothers in a maternity unit, and talked to them all about their births, and I found out all about the cycle of interventions that often happen, and I am SO grateful that I knew about all of that way before I even thought about giving birth.
But when I was ready to have a baby, I was still so terrified of giving birth.
I had trained in HypnoBirthing and Private Subconscious-Mind Healing during my pregnancy with my daughter.
And for her birth, I went from being terrified, to being completely trusting of my body and my baby, and had a mostly unassisted birth with my daughter. It was 86 hours of posterior birthing and the most empowering thing ever.
Four and a half years later, with my pregnancy and birth with my son, I was ready to trust my body even more.
With my daughter, I’d found a doctor who was willing to do blood tests for me, and I booked in to our local birthing centre, “just in case” – and we did end up there for the last half an hour, which I was grateful for at the time.
With my son, I didn’t want to do any tests or visit any medical professionals. I wanted to take total responsibility for the whole experience.
At the end of my pregnancy with my daughter, a midwife friend visited from the U.K. and said that she had never before seen a woman so prepared for birth.
But for my son’s birth, taking complete responsibility for our health and wellbeing, I needed to take that even further.
I worked on physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels.
I followed The Gentle Birth Method by Dr. Gowri Motha and got herbs and potions shipped from the U.K. As part of that, I gave up sugar and wheat and a whole lot of other stuff! I ate really healthily (I’d already gone 99% organic before getting pregnant with my daughter and had had all my amalgam fillings out before getting pregnant with her too.)
I did daily yoga (with my daughter) and daily Private Subconscious-Mind Healing meditations (I had sat in with Peter Jackson, who was creating CalmBirth, and he let me practice it with others, and I used it with myself).
Every week I had a couple of treatments in things like craniosacral, deep muscle body work, acupuncture, etc.
I worked on shifting my fears with modalities like Private Subconsious-Mind Healing.
I did daily intending around the birth I wanted to have using methods from the training I’d done with the Field Project.
I had homeopathics.
I talked to Sunny in the womb.
I watched every video I could find on empowered unassisted birth. There weren’t many back them, but I watched them over and over and over again.
I read and re-read every book on unassisted birth, and everything I needed to know from a safety point of view.
I read and re-read every book I could find on empowered birth, and printed out dozens of articles.
Here is some of my pregnancy and birth book collection. I imagine there are a whole load more books out there now, 11 years later!
And because I was wanting to prevent another posterior birth, I read all the books I could find on it, lay on my left side the whole way through, never sat back in leaning-back chairs, and did a whole lot of exercises to help.
*****And one of the most helpful things I read was Back Labour no More by Janie McCoy King. I recommend this book to ANY woman who has had a posterior baby, or who has a sway back or a back injury.
Birthing day came, and Sunny was still posterior.
I connected with my willingness to have him that day. We didn’t go to the beach as we had done every day before that, with me walking up to the lighthouse each day.
So I used the lifting technique as in Back Labour no More
(I tried Rebozo and other techniques but they didn’t really do if for me.)
The lifting technique was AMAZING.
(I met Janie McCoy King about 3 years ago, after telling Peter Jackson, founder of Calmbirth about her, and her coming to Australia to speak to Calmbirth Educators about her work. And I got to talk there about my experience with Sunny’s birth!)
The whole thing about posterior babies is that because of their positioning, with every surge, their head is pushed against our spine, which means two things – pain in our back, and the surges are relatively ineffective at helping open the cervix, hence the usually long birthing time.
With the lifting technique, we lift the baby so that with each surge, their head is pushing on the cervix, which means no pain in the back, and a much quicker birth.
Janie talks about how birthing using the lifting technique is often quick, and I found that too.
Each surge started off with a big sensation, and as soon as I lifted, the sensation became COMPLETELY COMFORTABLE.
It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised that I could keep lifting in between the surges too, so avoiding even those few uncomfortable seconds at the beginning of each surge.
He was still posterior, until second stage, which lasted for about 2 or 3 surges. I could feel him turn on the first, and then he flew out into the hands of his Dad in the bathroom.
The whole thing lasted for about an hour and a half.
And a couple of days later, a midwife visited so that we could get him a birth certificate, and she weighed him and we reckoned that he’d been about 9lbs.
It was incredibly empowering.
To have listened to myself all the way through. To have listened to him. To have done that together, it was the most amazing thing ever.
I knew that if I could do that, I could do almost anything.
AND, from that fast birth and his posterior positioning, his jaw was really tight. When he latched on, it really hurt.
I was grateful that this was my second birth, and I knew how comfortable breastfeeding had been with my daughter, and I’d listened to so many of her feelings, because if I hadn’t, there was no way that I would have been able to listen to his feelings on the first day he was here.
He had a big cry in my arms, and his jaw was more relaxed and he latched on less tightly. And he had another cry in my arms, and his jaw was even more relaxed. And after the third cry, his jaw was relaxed enough that feeding felt totally comfortable and we went on to have two easy and beautiful years of breastfeeding.
Our craniosacral therapist also came over the next day and gave us both a treatment.
I wonder if some babies who are having feeding challenges are holding in a whole lot of tension in their skulls, and whether crying-in-arms to release their birthing feelings, alongside things like craniosacral therapy, might help.
I share this story because I was a timid little girl.
I thought I was too ‘wounded’ (the word I used at the time and wouldn’t use now) to have children.
I was terrified thinking about giving birth.
We are amazing human beings and we are capable of massive healing and change.
You are a firework.
You are beautiful.
You are a unique soul.
The guilt, shame, self-judgment, self-comparison, shoulds, have-to’s, can’ts – they are all things that you acquired from your culture.
They are not you.
You are a unique being, beautiful, a firework of divine love.
And so is your child.
And all the parts of our lives as mothers are interconnected.
Our past, our feelings, our passions, our interests, our values, our callings, our family life, our bodies, our health, our inner loving crew, our outer loving crew, the messages from Life, and most of all, our WILLINGNESS.
And if any of this resonates with you, and you’re wanting to share more of your fireworks with the world, my Inner Loving Presence Process for Entrepreneurs Course is still open!
Click on the meme to find out more!
Love,
Marion
xxx