What is the the greatest lesson a woman should learn?

Tell me what do you think it is…..

I will tell you through this beautiful quote from Rupi Kaur.

That since day one, she’s already had everything she needs within herself. it’s the world that convinced her she did not.



Ever heard of the Smush? Yeah I hadn’t either until about two years ago but I had seen it in action for years. I worked in Executive Development for many years and here is what I observed. When talking about females they were often critiqued for who they were. When talking about males it was what he does. Females Being, Males Doing. Females noun, Males verb. And often with the women it was always along the lines of her being ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’. This teacher I came across, she calls it the Smush, this either being too much or not enough.

Females have been taught to play small for a lifetime. Our grandmothers taught us and their grandmothers taught them. Why? To stay safe. Do not draw attention to yourself, keep those emotions in check. This is centuries of conditioning and trauma we are holding in here. When we have been doing this those neural networks working with the nervous system about danger; they are pretty on edge.

It also causes us to repress all those emotions. Anger is an emotion that needs to move outward. When you are constantly suppressing it - because hey lets face it women’s anger is not ok - it is exhausting and depleting. You are leaking you energy all over the place when you do this. No wonder women get so tired. Is it any wonder when a woman goes through midlife transition and her body says “OK enough of this bullshit you have to let this out and do it now, she is like a detonator about to go off. All the time. There is a lot to come out.

When you have been ignoring your basic emotional cues for a lifetime and playing it small, you start to lose touch with what you are actually thinking and feeling, you get very confused. We stop being able to see the subtle stuff, our body often screams out in pain because she wants those emotions out there, where they are meant to go. We go numb, it affects our libido, we get overwhelmed.

Bodymind connection is the key. As is learning to express your desires. Complaining and nagging, they are unexpressed desires. Say that sentence to yourself out loud again. How do I express my desires I hear you ask? Practice saying what it is you really want. If you want to start practicing you desires, write ten our tonight in your journal. Every sentence has to start with ‘I want..”. Get explicit with your description of what you want. Play big.

Learning to celebrate your successes and do it with your sisters (actual sisters if you have them and friends we call sisters) is how we learn to honour each other.

I promise you, you have all it takes to step into your power and be absolutely magnificent, right there inside of you.

If you want to learn more hit reply and ask me a question or you can pass this onto someone who may be interested. I am running my ReConnect course at the end of May. It is a six week introductory online course to bodymind, to help you discover the inner wisdom and strength that you have. If you want to know more sign up to my mail list by subscribing at the bottom of my website.

Maiden to Mother Transition

When a young girl goes through Menarche, she is asked to let go of her childish ways so as to accept her maturing as a menstruating woman. In many indigenous cultures she is welcomed through ceremony and accepted into a circle of adult women in her tribe. This has been largely forgotten in western culture. Menstruation is still shrouded in mystery, shame and secrecy. Cultural norms mean women have to hide what is a massive part of their life.

During pregnancy and childbirth a new mother is asked to let go of egoic behaviour that will prevent her from giving selflessly, gently and open heartedly to her new baby. She is forced to face her shadow or perceived negative attributes that she has buried deep underground. This requires us to get extremely vulnerable. It can be a long and painfull transition. Through this transition you birth your own Inner Mother.

It requires us to get familiar with all the different parts of us - those we like and those parts we don't. It takes a lot of conscious exertion of energy to keep those parts we don't like in our unconscious. This plays out in our conscious life. These are child parts of us that were not loved or acknowledged when we were children, so we fragmented them off into our unconscious to stay safe. To survive we adopted behaviours used as strategies to make our way in the world many of them focused at keeping us in control. When we can really embrace those dark parts and learn to love them we emerge from this transition more whole.

Finding these underworld parts asks something different of us. We cannot access our unconscious through our rational and logical part of our brain. We need to go into our primal and limbic parts of our brain to feel for them in our body. So this work requires us to learn to be in our body; to experience all of our emotions in a grounded way. When we learn to love and accept our dark parts we stop projecting them onto other women. We start to heal our sisterhood wounds which in turn, helps us naturally support other women. We can see and own the messy side of ourselves and not get sabotaged by it.

Why is this transition so important? When we don't accept our dark parts we project them onto others. When we can't be with our own emotions in a grounded way and learn to self-soothe, we cannot soothe the new baby in our arms who comes into this world with an unregulated nervous system. For the development of healthy attachment patterns with our babies, we have to co-regulate their nervous systems to help them learn and grow. We teach them slowly how to self soothe and provide that sense of safety in their nervous system through our attunement to them, when they cry from hunger, tiredness or needing a nappy change. Learning to feel safe to be vulnerable aids in our personal development because we start to ask questions and seek to understand what is going on. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we learn to support other women in community and be able to hold space for them. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we open the door for our sexual empowerment.

Our journey through rites of passage is different to that of men. Women go into a dark place, the underworld. The vulnerability they experience in their descent is challenging and in the stripping back of parts of themselves they don’t need anymore, they plant the seeds for their new expanded self to grow. It is like a tree that sparks from a seed and first it grows roots down in the dark of the earth so that when it grows taller and its branches spread wider, it has a good base to support its growth. Every time we go through a transition in life we go to this place, the time it takes to transition and the degree of transformation is different every time.

When many women go back to work after parental leave many feel quite disconnected because they know they have changed, yet very few workplaces acknowledge that change or provide transition support for them to go back. Often many women experience a huge degree of cognitive dissonance because of this; they have to pretend they don’t have children at work. It can be a very confusing time for many women, they cannot just turn off the mother part of themselves. Why should they?

There is so little support for women post partum to work on all of this. Most of the support is physical and maybe looking for signs of depression. When we support our mothers in society we foster a healthy community and society. Our children are our future.

Well good news. Dr Nic Pawley and I will be launching our online course next year to help you create your inner mother. This course will focus on the bio/psycho/social aspects of your personal development. You will learn embodied practices to develop a healthy grounded relationship with your emotions; you will learn about post-partum health from a TCM perspective; the changing rythms of womens sexuality throughout their life; how to work on your unconscious childhood patterning that may be holding you back and how to create your inner mother.

If you are interested let us know. If you know someone who may be interested forward this email onto them.

Coming Home to ourselves

This year has been testing for all of us. Being locked down is not an enjoyable process but there is always a silver lining for many. Spending more time with your family, appreciating how much you enjoy your work and working with others, valuing your friendships. For some people they have realised that they really enjoy working from home and spending more time with their family; participating in helping in the home with cooking or gardening. We’ve also been illuminated about many issues that our western lifestyle allows us to live in ignorance of. Corona Virus is bad but every year thousands of children in developing economies die from diarrhoea. The environment, womens rights, racism, child abuse, domestic violence. It is all there every day, how is it that we seem to lived oblivious to it. Some people are finding this really overwhelming to have all of this in plain sight, how do you ground yourself?

Come back home, to your body. I always think my body is the house that I live in. So often we look outside or ourselves to find joy and pleasure. That big holiday somewhere exotic, new clothes, you get the picture. How do we find pleasure and joy in the ordinary and within our home? Find what is alive within you. Find the joy within you, find the support within you.

It is hard to take the perspective that values the ordinary, the boring and the everyday in our life. How do we learn to appreciate it, value it and find the joy within it?

I’ve created a little body meditation for you to ground yourself when you are feeling overwhelmed and sick of the ordinary, the boring, the everyday.

Grounding Breath practice

Kellie Stirling

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