Hello beautiful souls. Welcome to my blog!
With this blog, I intend to share my thoughts, explorations, vulnerabilities, truths, and knowledge as I get to learn and experience this life. My heart's song encompasses everything from pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, to infant/toddler development, authentic parenting, healing, and spiritual growth. This particular post will give you some insight into my personal journey, parenting, healing, and transforming, and practicing living my authentic truth.
parenting Journey begins
Since becoming a parent in 2021, I have embarked on a path of healing, self-discovery, and spiritual evolution. I am blessed to have experienced an uneventful, healthy pregnancy and an empowering, enjoyable birth. I practiced and prepared myself for the experience. I practiced yoga and meditation daily, listened to podcasts, and connected online with a doula that guided and empowered me. I felt confident with my body’s innate wisdom and power, and felt centered and grounded in my mind. I was excited to give birth. I remember saying to a family member, that I’ve got this pregnancy thing and birth, but I have no idea about after that.
My postpartum physical recovery was great. I tuned in to my body, continued my meditation practice, and was in awe of my body and this new life. My child and I took to breastfeeding very well (for the first 4 months). I was confident and soaring high. The first months (and years up until now) have been challenging AND blissful. Challenging to experience this transformation and loss of identity that I couldn’t comprehend for myself or vocalize to others around me. Blissful as I was watching this young human explore, expand, and develop. In awe of my boobs that were nourishing life and growth out of thin air. Challenging to navigate this new dynamic between my partner and I. Challenging AND enlightening to explore myself as a parent, to ditch all that I subconsciously thought about parenting and to tune into my intuition and be present with every moment and my true experience.
Dark Night of the soul
At 7 months postpartum, I took an opportunity to help a long time friend and my partner start a new business venture. It was a deep dive back into my pre-parenting life and a time even before meeting my partner. In this past, I was an owner/operator of a restaurant business and in a psychologically and emotionally abusive, unsafe relationship. This lasted for years. So back to this new venture, I found myself exactly where I was in that disempowering, silenced life situation. The same industry and the same role. Although the people around me were all different, the dynamic of the experience was the same. To my nervous system, I was right back where I was before I set myself free. I went into a deep dark hole. It was torturous leaving my 7 month old and I didn’t anticipate the insane workload that I would be undertaking. That wasn’t my plan. I felt deserted and betrayed by my partner and friend. Internally, I was in a deep dark tornado hole that was spiraling out of control. I became very reactive towards my partner, I isolated myself from my family, smoked weed daily to numb myself, and tried to cling on to any ounce of connection with my partner. My peace and joy was being with my son. That was home. That is where I wanted to be. To add on this pain, as I decided to start working, I experienced a pregnancy that my partner and I decided to end with an abortion. I felt deep within me that I was not in a situation where I could provide a stable life for this child. The day after the abortion, I was back at work. I never gave myself time to process or grieve or understand the experience. (That can be another blog post!)
Fatefully to me, after 6 weeks of jump starting this business, covid lockdowns shut us down. I was beyond relieved. I was already starting to train my replacement and this gave me a hard end to this. I was done. For a few weeks after I still tried to cling onto some sort of involvement. Thinking and feeling that I could do it and I wanted to do it. But I couldn’t and ultimately my soul didn’t want to.
My reactiveness, hypersensitivity, hypervigilance, heaviness, and depression continued. My parasympathetic nervous system was on high alert. Alarm bells were sounding all the time. I was in fight or flight with everything. (Except for caring for my child.) I was experiencing post-traumatic stress from my previous relationship and postpartum depression. The culmination of all the unprocessed trauma had begin to boil over and I was in a dark night of the soul.
I could see and feel that this was out of control. Bless his soul, but my partner was not prepared or equipped to support me. I was not even aware of the extent of the abuse I had suffered in my previous relationship or how it was impacting my entire sense of self, my way of relating to others and myself. (I continue to learn, explore, and heal this today) I felt discarded, unimportant, invalidated, and so alone. Our relationship suffered immensely. I knew something had to shift. And somewhere deep inside, I knew that it was only Me that could make the shift.
The shift begins
I found myself drawn to Magda Gerber’s Educaring approach and this respectful intuitive approach to caregiving and parenting during my pregnancy. So one day a voice in me got me to go to the RIE (Resources for Infant Educarers) website, and that led me to registering for their Foundations course. Within the same 10 minutes, the voice also told me to look up Doula. I registered for Doula training. I felt ignited. For the first time in my life, I was following my voice and doing something that felt aligned with my soul’s purpose.
Since then, I began to explore my intuition, I began to unveil my authenticity, develop my self-esteem, heal my heart and my soul, and reclaim my power. The RIE Foundations course is a course to explore, practice and embody an approach to developing authentic relationships with infants and fostering their authentic, confident, and conscious social-emotional development. For me, it also introduced me to my own authenticity. It enabled me to start shedding years of people-pleasing ways, fawning, living the way society tells me to, feeling unsafe with my emotions, and not feeling my worth. I started to read books that aligned with my experience and I finally felt validated, seen, heard, and understood. I found ways to begin to understand my trauma, my postpartum experience, and my relationships. I also delved into spirituality and have found a connection with the Divine Universe and continue to evolve spiritually and emotionally, releasing subconscious beliefs and thought patterns, uncovering my shadows, and aligning with my innate worth and soul’s calling. All of this is an ongoing practice that I aim to embrace every day.
i am that: Healing and forever practicing
Today I begin to express myself. I begin to unleash my voice. I have been separated from my child’s other parent for almost a year, which has been another experience in grieving and finding myself and my self-worth (another blog post to come most likely). I have nearly completed the certification requirements to be a certified Labour & Birth and Postpartum Doula which has fueled the flame for my passion of spreading love, knowledge, and empowerment to new and expecting parents. I have completed a year-long Yoga Teacher Training journey which facilitated a deep and beautiful journey of self-discovery. I have a trusting, authentic relationship with my son who is a beautiful, genuine, conscious, evolving soul that I have the privilege to experience this physical life with. I have the honour of giving care to four other curious and loving young humans, providing a respectful, nurturing environment for their souls to flourish and for them to explore and develop relationships. And I am starting to support parents providing prenatal education and yoga classes, pelvic floor and core workshops, intuitive parenting guidance, birth support, and postpartum support.
I speak my truth and pursue my passion
My mission and my passion is to empower, educate, and love others. I intend to share the realities of life as I continue to explore and embrace my new(ish) role as a parent and create my identity, one by design rather than indoctrination. I want to share evidence-based information about the perinatal experience and my journey of venturing into my own doula business. I want to support expectant parents to prepare for and embrace the wondrous, transformative, AND challenging journey of pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood. I want to share a different perspective of infants and toddlers and support parents to understand and facilitate their child(ren)’s optimal social-emotional well being as well as their spiritual development. I want to continue to practice to love myself, step into my power, and support others in their own healing journeys.
If you’ve kept reading this far, I am humbled. If you skipped some parts, I love you too!
Feel welcome to comment to share any of your feelings or thoughts, questions, or wonders. I will love to get to know you too!
If you are interested in connecting to inquire about services or anything else, text or email me. It is an honour and a privilege to be part of your journey in any way.
With so much love and gratitude,
Kristen
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