The secret of the embodied mother
One of the most common questions I get asked is how do you continue a spiritual practice after the birth of a child? What changes? Where previously there may have been time for meditation, retreats, solo adventures, now the woman shifts into the deeper devotional spiritual practice of the mother.
The very act of tethering brings you closer to god. When you serve at the altar of the child, everything is simplified. I often say, you can scrub floors in a monastery or you can stay home and become a mother. Both powerfully increase your capacity for love through service.
When you become a mother you learn the true meaning of prayer. The physical limitations of caring for a child increases the limitless capacity of the soul and the reliance on invisible helpers. The perception of the numinous expands with motherhood as you feel a profound connection to all those who have birthed, and the cosmic womb that births all our souls.
Motherhood is devotion to life itself. The belief that life is good, that life should continue, that the adventure of the soul in a human experience is worth undertaking and can be of good to the world.
Many women find after ecstatic birth experiences that their capacity for pleasure increases tenfold, and the opening of the womb and yoni through birth means their creative power flows stronger than it ever has before.
The opening of the heart through devotional mothering and breastfeeding means that the woman has become a powerful creatrix, as her ability to desire, conceive and birth becomes effortless. Manifestations come through quicker, and her desires unfold before her eyes.
The design of birth
Birth is designed to dissolve and reassemble a woman into a mother. It's one of the biggest initiations into power we will ever experience. When this unfolds as designed, the woman meets her inner shadow, her perceived limitations of body and soul, and blasts through them as she brings life into the world.
When a mother and child experience an ecstatic and powerful birth experience, their brains become wired to expect pleasure, freedom, success and so much more. When we see the level of coercion in maternity services it is clear to me that this design for birth does not suit those higher up.
Women on a birth high can move mountains for their children, will stand up to injustice, will have a sense of personal power that cannot be bullied out of them. They will raise their children to think for themselves.
Children who are not born afraid will not submit to anything that does not respect their humanity and innate sense of goodness and deservingness to exist.
What would it serve any of the patriarchal institutions to allow this to happen?
This is why you will only see lip service paid to the rate of interventions and birth trauma. It serves a purpose. That purpose is to weaken women and mothers and thus children, making a population that is compliant and subservient. It's a colonisation tactic older than we can imagine.
There was a time when this rite of passage commanded the highest respect for it's ability to transform a woman into a mother.
We remember.
Closing the Bones
Closing the Bones restores energetic integrity to the new mother. Ancient cultures would have understood that the physical act of opening your body would have left you open energetically too.
This is why you see in postpartum traditions from around the world, the mother is kept safe, she is protected, fed nourishing foods and her womb wrapped until she is ready to rejoin her community but this time as an honoured mother.
You also see a glimpse of this in the bible, where women are segregated but the reason given for this is being "unclean". People used to believe that the new mother was vulnerable to demons, I believe this is to do with the susceptibility to negative influences and perceptions when you are fresh out of the birth portal.
Closing the Bones brings completion to the birth journey. The mother has everything the baby had - she is rocked, swaddled, sung to. She is gently massaged. Then she remains in a liminal space, processing and integrating her journey to becoming a mother until she is ready to emerge from her cocoon.
Women cry, laugh, have profound realisations. Women who are energetically sensitive really enjoy having their vitality restored to them in this space.
Once we have restored the integrity of the energy centres the woman is able to move forward with greater discernment as she mothers her child and the whole world.
It's never too late to give yourself what you wish you would have had. We are always postpartum and it's my pleasure to offer this ceremony no matter how long ago you had a baby.