Matriarch by Clara Wisner the medicine of motherhood, nourishing the female body, and the deep value and necessity of sacred maternal love.

This piece has been percolating for a long time.
I’ve been in active, conscious, non extractive participation with my creative process long enough that I know better than to rush something that is percolating and gestating.
But I’ve been watching this one take form.
When something wants to be created through me it starts to circle me. I’ll be shown other pieces of writing, conversations with friends, posts on social media etc that inspire and awaken the thing in my own experience. 
One thing that spurred to me to get to work on this piece was I saw a very well known influencer and teacher in the world of sexual health post pictures of her emaciated looking body saying she feels amazing at 10% body fat. 
“Is this what people think is sexy?” I thought to myself. 
Women need at least 13% body fat to bleed and need closer to 20% to be fertile. 
This complete disregard for the truths of female biological health is just so tired and old. Women are meant to be juicy. 
That doesn’t meant you can’t be very healthfully slim. 
But it does mean eating enough for a grown ass woman, eating properly raised animal products, and having enough muscle mass to be able to painlessly get around in the world. 
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Amber Magnolia Hill’s most recent substack, ‘Children v society’s views on their mother’s bodies’ struck this thing that I know deep down in my bones that our bodies, no matter their fat percentage are glorious and the perfect haven for the people who love us.
I also had a conversation with Dr. Suuzie Hazen where we spoke about the Chinese medicine concept that each time a woman gives birth she gives away most of her life force and therefore, she is eventually made anew postpartum. 
There is a new physical density that comes with motherhood. There is a coming into the body that just isn’t there before you have children.
It doesn’t mean that you are necessarily bigger but there is a presence, a thickening and rooting that’s there post giving birth and nurturing a child that wasn’t there before. 
On a shallow level a lot of women think about their less perky breasts or wider hips post birth and think of this coming into their bodies more as a bad thing, when really it’s just a maturation of the body.
A maturation as perfectly natural (and as awkward and uncomfortable sometimes) as going through puberty. 
Another ping related to this topic: I was at a mother-centric retreat with my friend and incredible yoga teacher, Jessica Cartwright, and I’m remembering a short conversation about mothers’ bodies we had as well. 
We were both admiring the beauty of a body that has been used for its purpose. 
This is generally thought of as a bad, demeaning, and shameful thing too; to be “used up.” 
However, I believe there is something deeply magnetic about a mother’s body. A body that has served a deep, primal and spiritual purpose.
On a biological level our bodies are made to reproduce. A woman’s body is made to create, carry, birth, and nurture her children. 
This doesn’t have to be enjoyable every single step of the way, but it should be deeply fulfilling. 
I believe that our collective beliefs about what constitutes beauty, “health”, sex appeal and its value, and the ways we place virtue on youngness only, as a society make the transition from maiden to mother much more of a struggle than it needs to be.
There is also this idea that men prefer young women and that once a woman has had children she is somehow not sexy. My experience has been quite the opposite. My husband far prefers my mother’s body as far as I can tell.
There is this idea that men primally want to procreate with multiple women, and I just don’t think this is necessarily true.
Men in committed monogamous relationships not only have more sex than single men, but also live longer and experience more joy in their lives. They are ultimately more satisfied with their lives on th

This last week I’ve been on what I am calling my “body love vacation.”
I took 6 nights to simply be with my body and listen.
The amount my body has changed and been through in the last 5 years is really mind blowing.
Two pregnancies and fully natural physiological births, co-sleeping with babies and toddlers, four years and counting of breastfeeding, gaining 80lbs over the course of this, completely redefining my identity on multiple levels, 1.5 years of severe insomnia, the stress of covid throughout this.. there is more, these are just the big ones.
And I can honestly say that these have been some of the best years of my life too.
I have never felt more well used, alive, and like it’s all for something bigger than and beyond me.
When I heard Lindsay Courcelle being interviewed on Amber Magnolia Hill’s podcast Medicine Stories a few years ago, I could feel the resonance in what they were discussing and I knew that part of my lingering health issues were related to my fascia and what it was holding on to.
When Lindsay shared that she offers week long intensives where people travel to see her for this myofascial release technique body work I felt the very familiar zing of “this is for me.”
So end of last week, I got on a plane to Vermont, leaving my girls for the longest I’ve ever left them, 6 nights, to be with my body and be held and worked on by Lindsay for 2-3 hours a day.
I also put everything else I have been holding down to simply see what comes up. No work. No house care. No cooking if I didn’t want to. No distractions or external obstacles to simply being with my body as the intention.
My work with Lindsay is still landing and digesting. I will say that I have never had such a clear experience of the “issues being held in the tissues.”
There was no doubt that an experience with an ex boyfriend I hadn’t thought about in years was stored in my diaphragm.
There was no doubt that there was sexual shame and repression from another experience I’d had being held in the left side of my pelvic bowl.
The work I did with Lindsay gave me a more visceral experience of this truth than I’ve ever had before.
I know releasing what I released this week is huge. Some things my body had been stuck holding for over 10 years, moved and changed. I feel I even moved emotions and patterns that may not have even been mine but were generational in nature.
I had a session a few weeks ago with Alee Reina and one of the nuggets that has stayed with me since is: “Receive, Don’t Carry.”
My system is big.
It’s wide.
And I can carry a lot.
I have always been able to.
My generational pattern and inheritance is to just take it on. Carry it. Hold it. Just because I can and I’m doing it on the level of the unconscious.
(this, carrying because we can, is also a manifesting generator thing in human design.)
My system is big for a reason. I was created this way because I have a lot to do in this lifetime.
I have a lot of energy I am designed to bring into manifested reality.
I am like lighting being grounded in the earth. (Come to the Magic of Minerals class on Tuesday for more on how every human being is actually light).
But if I’m not aware and conscious, I will take on everything. Just hold it. Because I can.
What I know for sure from my personal and professional experience with healing the physical body is that no one else can live inside you, but you.
The obsession with finding someone who is the “authority” on whatever subject and following them just because you are desperate for some outcome is not how we really heal.
It will never be how we heal.
Those parts that are so desperate to figure out your health issues are not the parts that bring healing.
As radical as this is to say: healing isn’t something we figure out.
I know, that is a big one.
In the way I work with the body; you cannot protocol your way out of your ongoing body issues.
You cannot yoga, meditate, restrict, or supplement, your w

The programming to be a good person runs deep.
Our parents were programmed and they programmed us with things like “Be polite!” “Be nice!” “Include everyone!” “Don’t stare!” 
In my childhood and even still in a lot of ways, it’s, “Don’t be so opinionated, big, inconvenient, needy.” “Don’t take up so much space.” “Don’t be so assured of yourself.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “How can you be so sure?”
Maybe your programming was slightly different, but the thread that all these programs come back to is: don’t be you. 
Don’t show all sides of yourself. Be more predictable. Less wild and unruly. Be nicer. Be good. 
What does it mean to be good when you’re a child? 
Basically, it’s to have less needs and be more manageable. To be happy and go with the flow. To listen to authority without too much push back, because (and those of us who are parents know this) it’s way easier to parent if your kids listen to you. 
So we all have some variation of programming around good equals only acceptable parts of myself, not all parts of myself.
It seems very obvious to me that the ‘light and love’ teachings and veneers I see in a lot of spiritual teachers and coaches is just this same only good is ok programming dressed up with feathers and palo santo. 
If you are actually going to undergo or hold people through true alchemical transformation you are going to need to get dirty and go to dark places. 
You are going to have to open up all those basement rooms of yourself you’ve locked away and pretended you don’t have in the interest of being good.
You are going to have to face your shadow and your unconscious.
You are going to have to admit you take stinky s***s, get rashes, and have body odor.
You’re going to have to feel the ways you’ve been wounded and how that wounding has hurt other people, maybe even people you love.
You’re going to have to come to terms with the parts of yourself that don’t fit into a spiritual love and light groove. You’re going to have to come to terms with the parts of yourself that have ulterior motives and want to look cool, be wanted, and belong at all costs.
We are no longer living in the age of the guru.
We’ve seen venerated spiritual teacher after venerated spiritual teacher be brought down to the level of imperfect humanity.
Sex scandals. 
Cult accusations. 
Priests and altar boys.
Spending money on private jets, hookers, and drugs.
Using their power and influence for their own personal gain.
Ultimately, we’ve seen how even the most respected good people icons of our collective society have done some very seedy and sleazy things.
Ghandi slept naked with his teenage niece. Martin Luther King cheated on his wife regularly and was known to be a womanizer. These are just examples.
To me, I just see all this as a reflection of how far we’ve gone off track when it comes to placing one human being at a higher level than another. It points to how much distortion there is in collective spiritual communities, in general.
It points to the fact that when we exalt our “goodness” at the expense of our “badness” we inevitably create toxicity. When our darkness gets squeezed and locked away, it putrefies.
This is the age of The Mother. The age of interdependent wisdom. The age of the mycelium network. The age where we see that from the dark comes life itself. That light and dark aren’t so different and that one begets the other.
This is the age of integration and brining light into the darkness and seeing that they are two sides of the same coin.
This is the age of understanding that the soil under our feet is made of death and decay. And it is the only thing from which new life springs. 
New age spirituality and the idea that we need to go through some sort of ascension process is one giant bypass over the Truth which is every single one of us is holy and every single one of us is human. 
Doi

I wrote the lower part of this quickly on my instagram stories yesterday during the times I had to wait for the dentist to come in and check me at my appointment.
I like to share how real-life my expression is. I am deeply committed to cultivating my creativity daily. I journal pages and pages. I record voice notes to myself in the car. I write plenty of things that never get published. I am always reading at least three books at a time (mostly fiction these days).
I sing. I color and paint with my kids. I dance. I walk. I spend a lot of time in nature. I do a lot of creative things for no reason other than I enjoy them and they feel good.
I think of creativity as an internal fire that needs to be stoked and tended. It needs to have kindling, small sticks, and sometimes a big log that burns slow for a long time, put on it.
You don’t have to force yourself to write every day, but you do have to be tending to the fire in some way. Blowing some air on it. Observing it and feeling into what it needs.
I am pretty much willing to write and express most days and always being in process and practice with my path, I have a good burning fire of creation that I am always tending to.
Most of what actually gets shared publicly comes from a big flare of that fire and something just comes through like a lightening bolt and needs to be written down and shared at that moment. A lot of times if I wait and try to come back to it later; it won’t land.
If you don’t have these lightening bolt moments I think this means your creative fire may need some tending. You can’t have a roaring fire without some small burning twigs initially.
I also have pieces I work on for months that need to simmer and bake.
So I am always writing on my phone in between appointments, squeezing it in while my kids are entertained for a few minutes, or asking my husband if he can be with the girls while I pop up to my computer to get something out.
I never have glamorous or perfect conditions to write. Ever.
So this is just an intro to what I wrote while at the dentist yesterday that just felt like it needed to be put out and shared immediately. I have spent a few moments with it to flesh it out a bit more.

I want to talk about the victimized mother. She is the mother who feels resentful of her partner or other people because she feels they don’t support her or help her. 
She is the mother who constantly feels bitter, spiteful, annoyed, and dissatisfied with her partner’s ability to show up for fatherhood or partnership. 
The Victimized Mother and the Martyr Mother are actually the same.
You cannot be victimized if there is a choice. And there is always a choice.
[I wrote about this in this piece: The Victimized Mother and the Well Used Mother]
Believe me, one of my core stories is that I have to do everything, that other people won’t do it so I’ll just do it.
And this story took me to full on burn out in early motherhood. 
I know the story of “I have to do it all..” very, very well. 
I am also well aware that we live in a time when mothers are expected to be super human.
But that’s actually the place where we have a choice and a responsibility to choose another way.
If we want to change the way mothers are seen in the collective we have to hold the pole in our very personal lives of the full and fed mother.
We, in our very personal lives, have to be committed to not perpetuating the story that women have to do the lion’s share of the parenting, have impressive careers, be super hot, take great care of themselves, be perfect attuned gentle-parenting mothers and and and and….
We get to create our own experience of Motherhood. 
You can create whatever motherhood experience you would like to have.
For me to have the experience of being a full, fed, and revered mother, which is the experience I want to have, I have to take responsibility when it comes to knowing what I need, asking for help with I need, being clear on my priori

For me every day is earth day.
She is my greatest comfort and my greatest inspiration.
We are all cells within the being that is Gaia.
This may sound woo woo or esoteric but to me it actually feels like the real-est thing I’ve ever known. 
She is our Mother.
We are her children.
The very matter of our being made of the same star stuff that She is. 
Her beauty is our beauty. 
Her waters our waters. 
I am a human living in a collective time where we do not respect our Mother.
This is evident everywhere from the way we treat the Earth to the way we treat the female body; really all bodies, to the way we collectively exalt logic and reason over feeling and intuition. 
The Earth speaks in feeling and sensation, just the same as our precious soft bodies. 
When I tune into the Earth and Nature itself I feel two things as it pertains to humans:
1. We think we are so separate and we matter so much, but to the Earth we are just a small piece of such a vastly larger whole. We believe our minds have it all figured out and that we need to “save” Her. But to Her, this is like a teenager telling his parents he knows how to take care of a family or run a household. There is no wisdom in it. No maturity and reverence in the idea that we small humans know what is best for a billions of years old being. 

2. There is grief in the Earth when it comes to humans. I feel it when I tune into the trees around my home or the soil under my feet. She says; how could you believe there is not enough for you? Like a mother whose child has lost their way a bit, She feels a deep sadness in our disconnection. But she also trusts us. As a mother needs to trusts her children to find their way. 
I don’t have a message of doom and gloom for our Earth.
I don’t have any call to action.
I just feel a heart opening and womb landing gratitude for our Mother today and all days and the being-ness she provides. 
The unconditional love we all are so desperate for is available to us, right here, right now. 
Go find a piece of grass or ground and let yourself remember your original Mother is here.
She never left you and she will never leave you.
If you would like, please listen to this guided 11 minute guided meditation from my land to you on this Earth Day.





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*I shared this on Instagram a couple days ago and am resharing here because it’s gotten a lot of action and I’m announcing a free class I’m teaching tomorrow.

I got a question from a follower yesterday, “why are we still fat when we eat well and move our bodies?”
This question has been the source of so much inspiration for me since yesterday because it’s actually a question I have been asking myself for almost two years now.
I have been deep in the practice of trusting and loving my body. I wrote this piece when the bulk of the weight gain started.
I have been asking myself: if I trust my body and I love my body and I know I am providing my body with what she needs on a regular basis, why would my body put on weight and keep the weight on?
I have had many tender moments, lots of confusion, lots of looping thoughts about what if I’m all wrong and I need to just commit to a diet and exercise routine.
I have thought to myself many times that I need to DO something about this!
But then I come back to what to I know to be true. I come back to the truth that my body loves me and I love her and there is actually no way that what she undergoing isn’t the most intelligent thing for her to be doing with what she has and where she is.
Our bodies are of the unconscious realm. They are the results of our maternal lineage; the matter and the Ma. The weight that I have gained and continue to hold is not just a result of my choices in the last couple years, it’s the result of the choices I made in my 20’s and the choices my mother made in her 20s, and the choices her mother made in her 20’s.
Our bodies are our karma.
The way our body looks and functions now is the result of so much more than just what we eat and how much we move.
Most women who are overweight actually under eat which leads to a down regulated metabolism. So much of my weight gain has been the result of a constricted relationship with food for most of life and constantly trying to make myself smaller.
Our bodies are wise. Women who are fat are not less worthy of love and do not have something wrong with them. Our bodies are neutral. They are doing their best and always have been.
Being overweight is just a sign that our energy utilization systems are not functioning well.
In my experience, it is a result of our bodies giving us signs to slow down and listen and us choosing to not listen again and again, until our body believes it needs to put on a whole lot of extra cushion to pad sweet selves from the harshness we subject ourselves to through crash diets, brutal exercise regimes, starvation/binge cycles, substances, harsh inner critics, and living lives that do not respect our feminine physiology.
The solution isn’t going to be simple and it’s going to require a lot of self love, trust, and true mental and physical rest along with beautiful, joy filled movement.
It’s going to require changing how we view and enjoy food, movement, life and our bodies themselves.
Come to class this Friday, April 19th, 11-1pm PDT (if you can’t come I will send out a replay that will be available until the following Friday) where I will be unpacking this further and sharing more of my story.



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