My Journey from Separation and Fear to Belonging and Love
To begin, today, and every day, I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of this land where I live and work, which include the Arakwal people, the Minjungbal people, the Widjabul people, and the Bundjalung people. I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. I acknowledge and recognise them as the original storytellers and wisdom keepers.
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.
Early on in life, 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 closeness and connection for babies;
Our capacity to mend these early experiences, either as babies and children with Aware Parenting or later in life, as I did, with The Marion Method;
The Disconnected Domination Culture, where separation for babies and young children is still the norm and is essential for a foundation of disconnection.
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 and Bedford New College, which was 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 was quite a theme in my life, which fitted perfectly!
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 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.
eA 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, wide, 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, a ‘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 experienced several 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 that 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, and focussing on seeing life from a child’s eyes 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 which holds the Self, Love and Will at the centre of who we are.
I loved learning about, and working with, sub-personalities, 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 entailed a lot of time in maternity wards 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 having a year on a beach, after an intense decade!
I was indeed at the beach during a lot of that next year, 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 which 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 soon 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 searching ‘fear in birth’ online, and lo and behold, I discovered a process called HypnoBirthing. Even more amazingly, 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 at the time a HypnoBirthing practitioner. He told me about something called P.S.H. – Private Subconscious-mind Healing, which I trained in during my pregnancy. And, just weeks after doing 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 (free/wild) 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 bought ‘Tears and Tantrums’ and ‘The Aware Baby’ by Aletha Solter, PhD, and immersed myself in them.
We practiced all the other parts of Aware Parenting, except the listening to healing-feelings part, until Lana was three months old.
Despite deeply resonating 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 healing-feelings, and didn’t even think that she had any healing-feelings to express! But I began to realise, from clearly observing her behaviour, that she did have healing-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 on The Aware Parenting Podcast.)
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 suppressing and dissociating from her feelings.
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 almost 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 23, 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 my daughter was three-years-old (in 2005), and started supporting parents – 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 nine months old, still fully immersed in Aware Parenting, I knew I was looking for more modalities to complement my own journey of parenting and re-parenting.
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 nine day International Intensive with Marshall Rosenberg and others, and a one 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 ways, so I spoke Classical NVC to her, and she did indeed learn to think and speak in NVC, as did my son Sunny. 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 deeply influenced 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 and powerful 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 soon after he was born, 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, I listened to his healing-feelings on the first day of his life.
After each time I held him in my arms and listened to his healing-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 healing-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 control pattern as I had given Lana, so I really diligently distinguished between his needs for nourishment and his needs for expression, and listened to a much higher percentage of his healing-feelings than we 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 five years of our son’s life.
With Sunny, we started with Elimination Communication from when he was a newborn, which was a very different experience from starting at nine 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. From the time when Lana was a baby, I had set up The Prepared Environment and had loved giving all objects 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! I prefer the term and approach known here as ‘Natural Learning’.
Sunny didn’t ever enjoy workbooks much and has learnt much more through a completely Natural Learning approach.
Over 20 years of ‘ homeschooling’, I completely de-schooled myself and got free from Disconnected Domination Cultured conditioning in relation to 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 and living.
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, I see as all more indigenous ways of being, and we all thrived on them.
The next big learning and new modality 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, which has also profoundly influenced The Marion Method, particularly The Willingness Practice part of The Marion Method.
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 The Field Project, and 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 leaving his body in 2008 and me falling out with my (male) mentor.
The person most affected by the separation was Sunny, who was four at the time. He went from the most present, aware, gentle boy, to hitting and head-butting, from the huge unexpressed feelings of powerlessness he was experiencing.
That was the next chapter of my Aware Parenting journey. Up until then, Aware Parenting had been relatively easy for me to practice. 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, because of the many times I didn’t protect her from his aggression.
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, but some elements of the healing from that time took many years.
My focus after that was on our Natural Learning lifestyle, and I also started developing my own Marion Method 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 searched 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, Avalon Darnesh, 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 the first few years, I got up two hours before my children every morning and created a course a month.
Within a few years, I had created about 25 courses on Aware Parenting, and what was becoming The Marion Method.
For so many years, I had felt frustrated and had been wanting to share more of my work 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, with their own Natural Learning journey!
I also loved the design process of creating websites and social media posts – remember my love of drawing as a child? – those needs got met here!
I continued to develop the Marion Method 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 in 2015, and a month 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.
I was particularly focusing on Aware Parenting in creating courses, and yet, I began to see a theme. So many of the parents (who were mostly mothers) I was connecting with 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, both of which I created in 2015.
When creating my Power and Powerlessness in Parenting Course in 2015, more elements of The Marion Method emerged. 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, feeling old fears, repeatedly showed up to be loved, supported, protected, and heard.
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 mentees and created courses and online materials, the more that The Marion Method paradigm and practices came together.
By this time, I became clear that The Marion Method had three key elements:
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. Outer relationships can be transformed by healing that happens with the Soul version of people in our lives.
The Inner Loving Presence Process –
This is where we revisit younger parts of us with the support of our Inner Loving Presences. When these younger parts of us are deeply heard and experiences reparative experiences, old hurts are mended and Life doesn’t need to keep presenting the same themes to us again and again.
Our True Nature as Love
The more that our younger parts and all of our feelings and needs receive unconditional love, and we free ourselves from Disconnected Domination Culture conditioning, the more we live from our true nature as love rather than from our younger parts and cultural conditioning. This means that we experience more spaciousness, compassion, and free-flowing joy, whilst also being able to respond lovingly to whatever shows up in us and others.
Conversations with Life:
We are deeply interconnected with all of Life, and Life is constantly communicating with us, through signs, symptoms, and synchronicities. As we develop a more loving inner dialogue, and get free from DDC conditioning including guilt and shame, we also experience more and more that Life loves us and wants to support us in doing and having what we Love.
Life responds to our willingness and not-willingness, including what we are willing for but don’t want, rather than 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 Practices and Processes –
This became clearer as I created The Wonder of Willingness Course. It’s all about understanding our true nature as Will; our true power and how the Life force of the Universe flows through us.
Here we connect with our embodied YES: what we want and are willing for, and our embodied NO: what we don’t want and are not willing for, including our powerful NEO NO. As we get free from DDC conditioning that tricks us into believing that we are not powerful, we increasingly experience our true power and how Life responds to our willingness and not-willingness.
Over time, we increasingly live our lives in harmony with all of Life, following our callings, desires, and preferences, becoming willing for what we want and unwilling for what we don’t want, and trusting the timing of the unfolding of the events in our lives.
We increasingly create a personality, life, relationships, and work that are a clearer reflection of who we really are, our Soul. Alongside that, we experience a deep sense of meaning and purpose, of authenticity, and of effortless action, working in collaboration with Life.
I loved seeing how my understanding of the will and willingness and not-willingness came together from integrating the work of 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 (in their work, called ‘The Field’) responds to our willingness and not-willingness from The Field Project work.
I’m so grateful to all of these modalities and the people who developed them, who I name below.
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.
The Psychospiritual maps and models, practices and processes, became clearer and clearer.
I offered my first Marion Method Immersion in January 2018, and the model and methods have kept emerging, particularly in the process of parenting and reparenting, and also in responding lovingly and willingly to our callings.
Many people started asking how they could certify in using these practices and processes with mentees, which is where the idea for the Marion Method Mentoring Training came about. The first MMMT was in 2021, and there was a second intake in 2022. The MMMT is returning in an updated format in 2025.
I started 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 and consciousness.
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 itself 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, I created The Aware Parenting Podcast alongside Lael Stone, who stopped co-hosting in early 2023.
The podcast reached three million plays in December 2024.
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 books have all been bestsellers in several categories. I wrote and edited them all with the Marion Method practices, which means I didn’t once coerce myself to write, and am having a wonderful time writing books!
The Emotional Life of Babies, came out in September 2023.
I’m Here and I’m Listening was published in February 2024.
Sound Sleep and Secure Attachment with Aware Parenting came out in October 2024.
All of Your Feelings are Welcome came out in December 2024.
My first set of oracle cards, The Loving Presence Oracle Cards, also came out in December 2024.
I’m writing this update in January 2025,
Coming this year (alongside my usual mentoring, podcasts, and live rounds of courses):
The Marion Method Membership.
The Wonder of Willingness book.
The Psychospiritual ReParenting book.
The Aware Parenting Virtual Village.
My series of Aware Parenting children’s books.
A trilogy of books on mothering and The Marion Method.
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 the younger parts of me, and with all of Life. I feel a deep sense of belonging.
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 kind 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.
