Angelica Archangelica

I planted the Angelica the year before he landed in my womb, knowing she wouldn't flower until two years later. She grew sturdy and I waited with anticipation for them both. He came though and I grew, and she grew.

In tincture form she was prized amongst midwives. These days it's the doulas and mothers that nestle her in amongst the things that may be needed for birth. If a placenta is slow to come, she will send the energy needed for it's release. In the old days, she would have saved lives. These days, she can help avoid an unpleasant experience in theatre.

On an energetic level she supports the final transition the woman needs to make. The medicine wheel of birth spirals round and round as the woman journeys through the blood mysteries at each stage of her birth journey. Angelica is that final push from maiden to mother. Where the placenta has fed and sustained the baby in the womb, now the breasts must take over.

If there is any reluctance in fully embodying that mother role, the placenta may not come.

Last summer I was abed with my babe in the hot July sun, only able to manage watching the horses across the way as I fed him from my body under the apple trees. Without watering, many of the plants did not survive. My husband preoccupied with me, my children with the new trampoline...

This spring, babe in sling, I stood amongst the planters and raised beds and observed what had come through my postpartum neglect and what hadn't. Some things had to be replaced. Where the raspberry hadn't made it, several small babies had. One Lady's Mantle happily transferred to where the other one has been. One thing was for sure - the Angelica stood tall and proud, she had thrived despite me.

I sometimes think that is the essence of being a mother. Our children are so wonderful precisely because of - and simultaneously in spite of - who we are and what we did.

I teach my daughter that manifestation follows two simple rules, firstly we state our desire, then we release any internal resistance we have to receiving it. It's fifty percent us and fifty percent the universe. We must initiate and do the internal excavation, only then we find the universe will do the heavy lifting.

When it comes to something we deeply desire, we often encounter huge internal resistance - because what we seek involves relinquishing control. We say we want a baby, and we fight the experience of pregnancy and birth. We say we want a relationship and then we kick and push against the compromises that are required of us to love and accommodate another.

Nostalgia in the digital age is it's own particular kind of poison. My grandmothers of the past would have had maybe two photos of themselves - a childhood one, a wedding one. Like the six of cups in the tarot we can gaze into the goblet of the past and dream that it was better, we were more beautiful, more free, more fulfilled.

I want to stay the woman with the large belly amongst the hay fields, the one twirling in the garden, wild and free. I miss the version of me that was more naive and more certain. I miss who I was before the rivers of blood soaked through my white nightdress.

As the Angelica essence works it's way through my energy body, it comes to me... I have been fighting this experience of mothering for a third time like it wasn't me that prayed for it.

It seems to me that I take the Angelica today and the fabric of time parts. Ten months earlier I get out of the bed and forcibly birth my placenta, as the fear of keeping it in becomes greater than the fear of getting it out.

I land.

Women's work and secrecy

Women's work has always been done in secret, and it's no different now we have the internet. I don't share client stories, mostly because it's too intimate but also some things are almost too wild to be believed!

The incredible synchronicities, the mirroring with nature, sometimes bleeding as soon as you walk through my door, the way the womb has her own way of enacting justice.

Masculine business practices demand we show results and evidence but what evidence can there be? Where there are wombs there will be pain, and life, and loss - if all I do is make the woman in front of me feel loved, if I can support her to find beauty and meaning in her journey then it is a job well done.

Womb healing doesn't mean we skip off into the sunset with no symptoms finally enjoying the freedom of a man. Sometimes things get more painful before they are ready to release. Sometimes you meet me after the descent into the Underworld. Often during. Sometimes right before.

I've become reluctant to share healing spaces online even with permission because the longer I do this work the more strict my energetic hygiene is. It has to be strict or I know I won't last in this line of work.

Healing work, for me, means a kind of isolation. When a lot of my clients are space holders themselves it's a relief for them to come to me because they won't see me in their usual spaces.

It is oddly a blessing that these restrictions have really helped my creativity to flourish. For all the downsides of social media, when you can't share what you do and have to share who you are, it's an endless journey of self-expression.

With love x

the language of blood

every full moon, I dream of blood.

eight months postpartum and still in limbo state, I dream my red moon dreams where I am once again part of that sisterhood of shedding.

it's visceral and heavy as my womb contracts and weeps.

for the last ten years I've always been with the full moon - until that final miscarriage before conceiving my son, the delay and the duration of bleeding that finally shifted me over to the cycle of creation.

for women, blood is a language. the colour red bringing so many different meanings

something is ending

something is beginning

someone is coming

someone is leaving

something is right

something is wrong

duality first existed in the womb and in the language of the blood.

the cycle after ending a relationship where you can feel them leaving your womb.

the relief of a fresh start.

the first show of labour

the scant bleed as an embryo burrows into the womb

for my most recent pregnancy, praying not to see it every day for twenty weeks. my great great grandmother came to me in a vision between waking and sleep and held my baby in my womb firmly with hands that knew what it was to lose a child.

for my most recent birth, the blood was a warning sign. my body telling me in a language she knew I would understand, that I was being asked to make a sacrifice bigger than I understood to bring this life through.

we used to have a word for the menstruation before conception. it meant "the flowers". the bleed a woman had the cycle she conceived her baby was considered the flowers before the fruit. womb consciousness asks us to reorient ourselves to see the bleed as the beginning, not as the end.

for women who have been aching to conceive for a long time, who see blood as a failure, this reinterpretation can change things. flowers are a beginning. how we care for the flowers impacts the later fruit.

my baby's flowers came two days after supporting a hypnotic and otherworldly unassisted birth, my womb taking her cue from the mother just in time for my daughter's seventh birthday party. I made the cake and the food with a pounding head and my husband took over the festivities while I rested in my chair in the corner, eyes closed. I had made a promise long ago I would never miss her birthday for a birth, I was here, but not here.

there is a message I always have within myself, when I get to the root of what is causing an emotional outburst,

"nobody is coming to help you"

it's what has spurred most of my spiritual explorations since becoming a mother. when you are desperate for help you develop a heavy trust in the unseen.

but my husband was here, I could see him, and he was helping. two weeks later we were under an ancient yew as my baby's spirit fluttered down to us, finally coaxed down by our mutual vibration, the ceremony we were witnessing and the love emanating from the group.

likewise, with the blood, you must learn to trust it's unique language. it is not always what you want to see. it can be heartbreaking, devastating, frightening, painful. but it is a wisdom older than we can imagine, a language without words, one that we can learn, if we start to listen.