What Every Mother Needs

My days are spent with women. I sit with them and chat, I help to work out the tension in their soft aching tissues by using my hands on their bodies, I cook nourishing meals for them, I prepare them herbal baths in the tender postpartum time, but mostly… I listen. 

I don’t call myself a healer or a body worker.. I’m a midwife. That means: “with women.” That’s it. I hold space for women to share exactly where they are, what’s coming up for them in this place, in this Now, and by honoring this process and just… listening.. Women are able to heal themselves and evolve in a positive direction of their choosing. 

It’s not in ordinary everyday life that we are able to heal. We aren’t running around accomplishing our daily tasks and healing just by accident. We heal when we put effort into healing. We heal when we desire to eliminate or mitigate the effects of lifetimes of trauma, generational wounding. 

When we build that potency of desire within ourselves to the point that life can not remain the same as it always has been, it must shift. It feels scary and painful most of the time, because it is the unknown, but we know we need to find the path to the vision we now have of a better future, for ourselves and our children and their children. We are in this liminal space, this space of POTENTIAL. 

And that is where I meet women, usually. When they are in this in-between state of knowing .. but at the same time not knowing. Knowing the future, but not knowing how to get there. This time in our life when we feel like a caterpillar inside a chrysalis… slowly dissolving into this mass of goo that is not recognizable, getting ready to emerge on the other side into… the butterfly stage. 

Wow, so much potential there! And it’s not my job to shepherd or encourage these women to go in a certain direction. It’s my job to sit, to listen, and say, “Tell me more.” 

And when a woman is held energetically while she goes THERE, goes to the place where she can describe all the ways she is uncomfortable, all the ways she feels terrified of the future, all the issues that crop up on the way to that future.. That is where she is able to find the answers for herself. Not in ordinary reality, but in that space of altered brain waves that occurs when we are in flow and being held and listened to; witnessed. 

When we go to this altered state, of communication in sacred space, we are able to truly see ourselves and our lives from a wider perspective. We are able to know why we do the things we do, and why others do things their way as well. And we can heal from this place of wider knowing, of a broader perspective. 

A woman in pregnancy and in birth and in the postpartum time is being given SO much on an energetic and spiritual level, so much that no one else on earth could possibly give her, myself included. She is a portal in all of the ways, and she is channeling so much knowledge and information not only for herself and her own family, but for the collective. 

As a woman heals, her family heals, and as her family heals, we all heal collectively. The future is shifting and expanding right in front of our eyes, and it is doing it all in large part because of the women who are pregnant and doing the work. They are saying, “This [pattern, trauma, etc] ends with me.” 

This healing comes from within. As women, it can be helpful though to have the space held for us to wander and ramble out loud through whatever spiral we are in, so we can gain that perspective, and come to our own conclusions about what the best next steps are toward healing. 

My teacher Whapio says, “Healing is about a person facilitating a desire between themselves and a Greater Consciousness...God, the Divine or whatever you wish to name it...to be aligned with wholeness and free from any obstacle to maintaining that state.” 

Such power there. 

So, I continue on this path. This divine calling to be with women, to listen and hold space, and I am in awe of each woman’s ability to harness such times of liminality and discomfort and use that energy to shift us all into the better future we are all talking about day in and day out. What a time to be alive and what a calling I’ve found myself responding to. Thankful for all of the women who share space with me, who honor me as they ask me to witness them in their transformations. 

And I wish this for all women. Someone to sit, and listen, and say, “Tell me more.” 

Aho.