St Anne, grandmother of miracles

I prayed the St Anne Novena many years ago - the traditional entreatment of a woman yearning for a man. Yearning for the right man.

I've written before about grandmothers as the wisdom keepers of the village, knowing the character and heart of every young man they had watched grow from a baby. Maybe they had even been at his birth. Surely if you want a good man, you ask a grandmother?

My own grandmother, who managed to break the legacy of violence and choose the kindest of men, became an incredible judge of character, took one look at my daughter's father who was lavishing me with attention and said dryly "that won't last".

I made the chaplet and at the end placed a daisy bead a friend had sent me through the post. A year later I had a daisy engagement ring and matching earrings. St Anne was letting me know she had answered my prayer, in the language of flowers, of symbols.

Who is St Anne?

Mother of Mary, grandmother of Jesus.

Like many old women, seemingly forgotten, but the capacious lap from which all life springs and returns.

I discovered there was a St Anne's well near to where I live. I decided on St Anne's feast day this year, I would go to honour her, give thanks, let her know I hadn't forgotten her miracle and I was trying to nurture it.

My husband isn't a believer but is always happy to facilitate any pilgrimage of mine. The church and surrounding wildlife was breathtaking, like stepping into a dream. I found the well - locked away, but not difficult to climb. There was no water. But there was something. Beneath my feet I could feel the chasm under my feet, like at any moment the ground could give way and plunge me into the underworld womb.

I made my small altar and squatted down. I could feel the spiral energy of my womb and the spiral vortex of the well synchronising with each other. All I want, all I want... is a happy home and family. A prayer fell spontaneous from my lips-

Hail Anna full of grace

thy daughter is with thee

blessed art thou amongst grandmothers

and blessed is the fruit of thy womb

holy Anna, mother of the goddess

pray for us now and at the hour of our death

amen.

What she replied to me remains secret and tucked inside my heart.

It is because of that family that I couldn't stay there forever, and I emerged to find my husband and two children at the church. A poster outside said that the well was buried beneath years of neglect and used to depict St Anne with water pouring from her breasts.

I began to cry. Because I had felt her there and longed more than anything to see her.

Because I knew. The crone isn't a dry well, she is the original abundance. Years of neglect cannot cover her power, although they have tried to bury her. I longed to dig with my hands through the years of mud and uncover her.

We had been driving less than five minutes when we spotted a used books stall by the side of the road. My husband urged me to get out and look, that he was happy to keep driving to settle the toddler to sleep. He would come back for me in five minutes.

I couldn't see much that interested me and was about to turn away when I suddenly heard... look again. I saw then a biography of Bernadette of Lourdes and I opened it to the words "I am the immaculate conception", the message of the apparition of the Virgin Mary.

I have a statue of St Anne with Mary. Anne is holding her womb and Mary is holding her heart. Together they make the heart-womb river, the triple goddess, the Motherline. It settled in me deeply then. The immaculate conception is the womb connection that is passed from mother to daughter and on and on and on.

It took me a few days to read the biography of St Bernadette and I got nearly to the end when I laughed at the answer to my prayer to St Anne. Seems what the saint struggled with the most was a short temper and quick tongue. Trust a grandmother to shine a revealing and unflattering light on what could be the answer to your prayer! It's nearly always changing yourself.

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