August

What a messy and beautiful month. Devotions coming back in slowly... Grateful for bead practices and the accessibility of mantra and repetition when intensely mothering. A friend asked me what the difference is between working as a healer and being on maternity leave.

I call it maternity leave but really I know it will be years before I find my feet. The main difference for me is when working full time as a healer, your daily life is full of rituals, boundaries and mastery over energy. To be able to hold space for the flow, you must become a fortress. The routines that will protect your body and home from what is coming in and going out.

Magdalene, the tower.

How do I feel now? Like a marshmallow. Boundaries collapsed. Rituals blown to the wind. I am building back devotion step by step in new ways, alongside devotion to my baby. My bones have not even been closed yet and I definitely won't be ready for any work before then.

If you are hoping to work with me please join my waiting list, although I am active on social media I am not working and will not be for the foreseeable.

World breastfeeding week 2025

I wrote a whole post about world breastfeeding week then accidentally deleted it while I was breastfeeding. So here I go again...

I'm on five years and counting into nourishing babies, about half the time I have been a mother. It was the thing I was looking forward to the most third time around and also one of the biggest considerations about whether I felt able to commit to nourishing another child. Initiating a tether that might be in place for years to come.

I would dream of it years after weaning my last baby. My body remembers. It's built into my embodied memory and my psyche. The delight of it - their eyes wide and roving, the little gasps, the mouth open like a baby bird as they try to find the breast. The rapid suckling and then the deep and dreamy swallows as the milk pours out and oxytocin and prolactin settle over you like a mantle of calm.

Waking up in the dark of the night just as they stir and drawing them close, as they latch on and you both drift off into the land of sleep.

Your toddler falls over, and wails, and you settle them within seconds.

For my fellow type B mothers who may forget to pack snacks but it's impossible to forget your own breasts.

The day after I gave birth, feeding my third child, I remarked "I feel like I've got a superpower back. Like until now I was missing a limb."

Like anything, it's a mixture of light and shadow. The tongue tied baby where it felt like I was putting my nipple into the mouth of a shark. When she would only feed in the daytime if I stood wearily swaying and feeding her in the sling so she could control the flow.

DMER. Where my body became so overwhelmed by the domestic abuse I was living with, it gave me panic attacks when the milk let down. Luckily that disappeared when I left.

The sickness bugs where they vomit all over you and ask to latch on again. The toddler nursing aversion where you swear to all the gods you could do anything except feed them again, anything except that, but then they ask and you find the will to do it again. Somehow.

It amazes me that something so fundamental to us as a species has largely been lost in our modern society. In the UK we have one of the worst breastfeeding rates in the world. This is multifaceted and something I've explored in other posts in the past. There are so many possible solutions, reducing the medicalisation of birth, increasing visibility of breastfeeding, more trained support. 

From what I've observed there is often a war between wanting to breastfeed and societal expectations of how a new mother and baby should behave. 

For somebody as experienced as I am, I still feel a wave of anxiety latching my new baby in front of somebody I don't know very well. Especially if I feel some part of them disapproves. And that is exactly the sort of thing that stops the milk flowing and makes a baby fussy. I may flippantly say "you see more on the top shelf in the newsagents" but my body doesn't feel the same.

Postpartum women were never meant to be around what the body considers strangers or threats. More wisdom we have lost.

For breastfeeding to work for nearly every mother who wants to, I feel we would need a complete societal overhaul that I don't think I'll see in my lifetime.

So fruitful she uprooted herself

The land always mirrors what is happening in the womb. I've been experiencing this for years now. The hen that cut her brooding prematurely short when I miscarried for the first time. The baby pear tree with no roots that foretold my second pregnancy loss. Then the chick that hatched the day my son was born.

Today - the apple tree that had not borne fruit for years, that sheltered us for my Mother Blessing, fell over with the weight of her abundant harvest.

Uprooted, secret places now exposed to the light. Raw, exposed and blinking. For years she slumbered in the garden, safe and stagnant, until now. I joked with my husband the reason the orchard is fruitful this year is because of my singing. He said to me today "what has your singing done now?"

She is me - toppled and uprooted by her own desire to bring life into the world. All that was hidden is now painfully revealed.

I have seen this nature mirroring happen with clients as well. The womb path is not a permanent blissed out state of "love and light"... it's holding the balance between life and death through the human body and the cosmic portal, and experiencing them as intensely physical, intensely spiritual, dark and thorny and beautiful. It's being the altar where the work happens. It's sad and holy and synchronous in ways that are miraculous.