Hello again!
I’m listening to The Pretenders’ Hymn to Her as I write, which seems apt!
I feel a deep sense of excitement in offering my Love Being a Mother online course to you. It feels so deeply connected to why I’m here and what I’m doing on the planet!
The main theme of my life for the past 24 years has been mothers and babies/children/teens.
For so long, my own experiences as a baby and a child have fuelled my journey to heal and grow so that I am able to be present with my children, listen to their feelings, and nourish them in ways that help them keep connected with their true selves.
And that has been my passion in working with parents too – to help them do whatever they needed to do to help their babies and children stay deeply connected with who they really are, be capable of intimacy, confident in who they are and relatively free from old feelings and unhelpful beliefs so that they can share their unique gifts with the world.
And I have loved doing that; in individual sessions and groups and workshops.
Yet in the last three or so years, my focus has shifted.
I’ve been a mother for longer now (my children are 13 and 8), and I’ve experienced all kinds of things I didn’t think I would experience.
The ease of listening to them and being present with them in those earlier years has given way to more challenges for me, and a deepening sense of compassion for mothers everywhere.
As I’ve worked with mothers in my in-person Love Being a Mother groups, I’ve heard their stories, their challenges, and how their relationship with their children calls them to grow and evolve and stretch.
To heal old wounds, to feel old unfelt feelings, to learn how to value themselves and their needs, and to become more and more skilled at intimacy.
And each time I have been to the Uplift Festival, when speakers like Bruce Lipton (author of The Biology of Belief and The Honeymoon Effect) talk on stage, I feel deeply connected with the next step for me – and it is all about being part of this next evolutionary step for mothers.
Last night I was reading a book called “Eve – Sex, Childbirth and Motherhood through the Ages,” because I wanted to add more to the first module of the Love Being a Mother course, which is called, “Changing Cultural Core Convictions.”
And as I read through it, what struck me is that, although our life looks so modern, with our cars and computers and Facebook and Instagram and shopping malls and washing machines, that we have only recently come away from very very outdated beliefs about mothers and children. Very outdated! And that so many of those old beliefs and old ways are still entwined within our deepest minds. The outer is modern, but on the inside so many of us carry vestiges of the past.
Before 3,000 – 5,000 years ago, we gather that women were revered as the givers of life, as sacred beings.
As patriarchal religions spread, birth changed from a miracle into a curse from God.
The Book of Genesis says, “I will greatly multiply this sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and they desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
By the middle ages, women were seen as even more spiritually unclean after giving birth than before it. For hundreds of years, babies were valued little, and infanticide was common. If babies were so little valued, how could mothers be valued either?
In the eighteenth century, babies were taken from wealthy mothers to be looked after a wet nurse. The wet nurse was a poor woman with her own baby; early ‘rules’ forbade her breastfeeding her own baby, so many of these babies died.
Over time, our beliefs about mothers and children have become gradually more friendly.
However, even as recently as Victorian times, children from very young ages were still expected to work, and only in 1814 did it become an offence to steal a baby from its parents!
Things came a long way in the 20th century, with advances in our knowledge about how childhood affects us as adults, and in women’s rights.
However, despite these outer changes, most of us as mothers still carry watered down versions of those beliefs.
We may not believe that being a woman and a mother means being cursed by sin, but how many of us value our needs so deeply that meeting them is as natural and unquestioned as breathing?
How many of us find it effortless to be deeply compassionate with ourselves at all times?
How many of us have enough support and nourishment?
How many of us never punish ourselves or pour the hot tar of guilt all over us?
As humanity, we are still very much in the process of becoming who we can be; healing from old painful hurts and destructive beliefs.
And this is what we are dealing with now as mothers. When things get challenging, much of it is caused by these old and outdated collective beliefs and feelings, as well as our own individual ancestral and historical beliefs and feelings.
But what an exciting time it is! The difference now is that we are taking part in this evolution consciously.
We are no longer just letting the evolution happen, without realising it.
NOW, with all our knowledge and skills, we can look back and see where we have come from, and look forward and see where we are going, and understand the next steps we need to take.
Away from concepts of original sin to those of original innocence.
Away from punishments and rewards to compassion and love.
Away from sacrifice and self-negation to valuing and honouring ourselves.
Away from either/or thinking to inclusion and higher-order thinking.
Away from judgment, comparison and competition to compassion, acceptance and celebration.
Away from lack to abundance.
So, I created this course for us as mothers.
So we can continue to take part in this process of conscious evolution.
To become once again, at a new turn of the spiral, the sacred beings that we are.
We give life, and we nurture it. We fundamentally influence the evolution of humanity by the way we are with our babies, children and teenagers.
We have so much power. But we have been taught to forget it, to hide it, to pretend it isn’t there, to fear it, and to use it in distorted ways.
It is time for us to reclaim the next evolutionary spiral of who we really are as mothers.
And that changes the world; for as we need to learn to deeply value ourselves as individual mothers, so do we need to learn to value other mothers, and also the earth, which in so many cultures is seen as the Mother.
As we value ourselves, we change the collective consciousness, and we also change our relationship as humanity to the earth that is our home.
So, if you’re interested in taking part in this, in valuing your needs, desires, feelings, knowing the beauty of honouring doing what you love, loving your feminine feelings, and the feelings of your baby/child/teen; if you want to feel deeply connected with mothers around the world, then come and have a look at the course.
Much love and gratitude to you, and all that you are being and doing as a mother.
Love,
Marion
January 2015