The road to motherhood was not an easy one for me. I’ve wanted to be a mother for as long as I can remember, and funnily enough I always had an uneasy feeling that getting pregnant wouldn’t be seamless. Turns out my sixth sense was right. It took two years and a lot of fertility treatments before our daughter Lyra was conceived. But this story isn’t really about Lyra, it’s about reconnecting to my body, and the healing I chose to seek while I tried to get pregnant.

What is your body part that you wish you could get rid of? Just cut off and be done with? Mine has always been my stomach. It’s the first place I gain my weight and it’s what I hide with loose clothing, wrapping my arms around my midsection and even not breathing too deeply (don’t want to make it bigger!). About a year into fertility treatments I realized that I needed to address this part of myself that I hated if I was going to make it a loving, safe home for my baby. I was put in touch with a bioenergetics therapist and we had the coolest therapy session. I went into a soundproof room with baseball bats, padded furniture and the instruction to hit and throw shit..and scream as loud as I wanted. This was incredibly hard for me to do. Girls are taught that screaming is inappropriate and that throwing and hitting are not “nice” things to do. Even if we have progressive parents, the cultural cues around us make it really hard to push against this mentality. So, after some coaching from my therapist, she held the space for me while I slammed the room with a baseball bat and screamed and cried at the top of my lungs. When I came to a place of calm, I scanned my body and felt vulnerability and fear in my stomach. The first thing that surfaced in my brain and body was that I’d been attacked in my belly (not in this life), and I was still carrying the deep wound it had created. This was a huge turning point for me. I began to look at this part of my body as if she were a neglected child (I had to make it an intense visual to break through my inner critic) and started giving her love everyday. Caressing her, creating new mantras about this part of my body and even painting her with a beautiful flower before conceiving Lyra. She was now a her and not an it that I wanted to cut off with a knife and throw in the trash. She was now a temple that would hold my baby.

I forgot about this experience until I became pregnant for a second time with our son River. Seven months into my pregnancy I attended a week-long women’s retreat in the Hudson Valley. It was a physically, mentally and emotionally intense week of yoga and early morning meditations. Needless to say, our group of women bonded over the course of the week. On one of our last days together, we went to the sanctuary for a healing circle. I had never attended anything like this before. The sanctuary itself is a calming, beautiful building that sits on top of a hill. As you walk up the path to the entrance, you hear wind chimes and trickling water from the creek bed along the path. When we entered, we all sat down in a circle, and our teacher asked me to sit in the center. Then, the women surrounding me began singing a healing mantra and one by one came into the circle to bless myself and my baby. I cried the entire time, realizing how sacred and powerful this ritual was. Many of the women who came in to bless my son were also crying with the power of what we were doing for each other. Because it was a healing circle, anyone who wanted healing could come into the circle as well. Later, a friend told me that at one point there were women lying down with their heads facing me, like a flower, and we were all receiving healing as the women surrounding us sang. It is an experience I will never forget and one I would like to create for other women someday. Almost 2 years later, I woke up from a dream while I was nursing my son in bed and realized I had come full circle. The trauma of being attacked was no longer stored in my belly, and the day I received those blessings was the day it dissolved completely. Yes, I had done a lot of deep healing and rewiring in my brain prior to this circle, but it was the sacred ritual of prayers and blessings from so many women that shifted the energy once and for all.

I share both of these stories openly and honestly with no filter. This is my truth. But, even if it is hard to wrap your head around parts of these stories (which is ok!), there are two really important things that I've learned, that we can all apply to ourselves.....

The parts of our bodies that we hate, find shame in, and want to get rid of, are the parts of ourselves that can lead to the most healing.

and secondly...

When women get together in support, love, celebration and without judgement we are the most powerful force available to us. We can heal ourselves, each other, and the world.