Tend

I’ve heard the word hozho translated as beauty, harmony, balance, love, grace, joy, acceptance, gratitude, service.

I like imagining that it is all of these things— and the larger project of making beauty out of our lives. Darryl has taught me that hozho is a deep spiritual practice and way of life. To show up to each moment and say YES. To show up to the brokenness and pain of life and say YES. To show up to our own beauty and collective joy and say YES.

More indigenous wisdom in Episode 6. Link in bio.

Next week is the final episode of Season One of The Birth of a Mother Podcast! I'm taking a pause today to reflect on the conversations with my beautiful elders. I'm so grateful to each of them for the wisdom, tenderness, and humor that they embody and that helped lay a strong foundation for my own mothering journey.​​​​​​​​​
It has me thinking about the ways that we mark transitions in our lives. The ways that we pause to invite our bodies, minds, hearts and spirits to attend to what is taking place. Anthropologist Roland Grimes writes that rituals are ways of embodying meaning.

How did you mark your transition into motherhood? How do attend to the transitions in your life?

Sarita Bennett has been attending births for over 40 years as both a midwife and family practice physician. She is also an incredible storyteller! In the latest episode of The Birth of a Mother, we talk about community midwifery, our own birth experiences, and the future of birth 🔥❤️

I’m so grateful to have been supported by and to continue to learn from this amazing woman.

Episode 4, Supporting the Physiology of Birth available now on Apple and Spotify. Link in bio!

Talking about grief in the context of pregnancy and birth can be taboo! But grief is such a common experience (for many different reasons) and can be a powerful guide into greater connection and aliveness.

The incredible Ashley Gates Jansen and I talk about our own griefs and, as she puts it, “the gold at the heart of the grief experience” on the latest episode of The Birth of a Mother Podcast out now. We also just crack each other up 😏

Join us on Apple, Spotify or the link in bio

In pregnancy, our bodies invite us into counter cultural-wisdom that prepares us for motherhood and that the world desperately needs. Things like how to slow down, how to be present, how to experience the fullness of our humanness.

In my latest conversation with Therese Jornlin, we talk about:
— birth as an initiation that is meaningful for the entire community
— how feelings of dissonance can be powerful guides into our power
— how gathering in community and ceremony can birth us out of old paradigms into new paradigms of connection and belonging

and much more!

Episode 2 available now on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Link in bio

5 years ago today, I became a mother for the first time. During that time, my body
offered me so many opportunities for new awareness, healing, and growth. I remember thinking, why is no one talking about this?

Well, now we are.

The Birth of a Mother Podcast has been incubating over the past 5 years and, much like Tend, was born out of my own journeys becoming a mother. Pregnancy and birth have been profound, life-expanding experiences that led me more deeply into the heart of myself and my
relationship with life than ever before.

For our first season, Conversations with Elders, I want to invite you into my inner circle, to hear from the elders who walked alongside me in my own childbearing journeys, helping me feel seen, supported and cared for.

I hope you will find our conversations intriguing, enlivening, and above all, I hope they inspire you to experience yourself and your own journey in new and surprising ways.

I would be so honored if you give it a listen and let me know what you think!

Tamara

Available on Apple, Spotify and link in bio.

This week, we wrapped up our spring Incubator! Over the past 6 weeks, a group of us gathered weekly to explore pregnancy and birth as a transformative journey and deepen into our own embodied wisdom and insights.

We explored sensuality & self-care, ancestral healing, cyclicality & belonging, and birth as a sacred ceremony. Each week could have been an entire course in itself!

I am reminded again and again of the power and importance of women showing up for themselves and each other. And how transformative it is to create spaces to tend to our inner worlds.

Our culture often makes the mistake of thinking that the “important work” is happening “out there.” In my experience, the truly revolutionary labor is happening within and between us.

We had an intergenerational group— some postpartum moms, a first-time pregnant mom, a second-time pregnant mom, a mom who had experienced a recent loss. And we all found a space of belonging together. We were each essential to the whole.

Something magic happens when we gather to behold and be held by people at different points in the same journey. We remember more of who we are.

I am left with the bone deep knowing that these explorations are SO ESSENTIAL and they must be done IN COMMUNITY. Our culture has not integrated the beauty and sacredness of birth into the way we live or relate to ourselves, each other, and life. There is so much waiting for us.

If you are interested in joining a future iteration, DM us or sign up for our newsletter at tend.us We would love have you in our community!

Our April Incubator starts next week! ❤️❤️

Link in bio.

PSA: feeling safe and supported is essential to birthing well. If your care provider (whether it be an ob/gyn, midwife, doula or other) isn’t doing their job, it is not too late to switch providers.

If switching providers isn’t a viable option, think about who you can have with you (a partner, family member, friend, or doula) to help you feel seen, supported, and cared for during your birth and throughout your pregnancy and postpartum journey. It will make all the difference!

It can be helpful to remember that while everyone’s birth journey is unique, we are also part of a great lineage that has existed since the dawn of humanity. The lineage of ancestors that have birthed each new generation into being. The relations that live in us and travel back and back and back, to the beginning.

The wisdom of birth lives in our bodies. It is innate. Instinctual. Passed down. It connect us with each other and with all of life.

What is it to become a mother? How do our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits expand and evolve in pregnancy to prepare us for motherhood and for life?

Join us in an intimate cohort for a 6-week guided journey beginning in April. Each week, we will create a slow and soulful space to explore our own embodied journeys, following the lead of the pregnant body.

It will be a place of grounding, a place of connection, a place of belonging.

More details and application link in bio.

We’ve spent the winter in deep rest and reflection, dreaming about our offerings for 2023.

We are so grateful to the women who joined us on zoom last fall and feel proud about the spaces we cultivated together. We laughed, we cried, we raged. We explored the tender places and the beauty places of our own embodied experiences & collective wisdom.

Now that we’ve passed the mid-point of winter, and can feel the subtle stirrings of spring within and around us, we’re excited to share what we’ve been incubating.

Sign up for our newsletter at tend.us to be the first to know. More soon ❤️

Our final Community Circle of the year is this Wednesday, 11am EST.

Together, we’ll explore how we might align with our own inner rhythm and center ourselves to maximize nourishment and presence this holiday season. It’s going to be good! We hope you will join us.

Link in bio.

Our final Community Circle of the year is this Thursday, 11am EST.

Together, we’ll explore how we might align with our own inner rhythm and center ourselves to maximize nourishment and presence this holiday season. It’s going to be good! We hope you will join us.

Link in bio.

Motherhood teaches us what has always been true: we are not isolated individuals alone in the universe. Rather, we exist IN RELATIONSHIP… with ourselves, with each other, with the world.

It is through our relationships that we get to experience ourselves and discover who we truly are, individually and collectively.

I remember marveling at my son when he was first born, remembering the feeling of his body existing and growing in mine. And even though he was now separate, the memory of our entanglement lived in my bones. My relationship to everything and everyone was no longer an abstraction, but an embodied knowing. My relationship to life was forever transformed.

📷:

Our circles are an opportunity to touch in to your own journey and to connect with other pregnant women/people and new mothers. Everything is welcome, everything belongs.

In a circle, each persons’ experience is valued as an essential part of the whole. A fuller story emerges when we come together!

Sometimes we think that if someone is struggling or someone is happy, we have to match whatever they’re going through, but we’ve found that when we each stand in our own unique truth, we get to experience a fuller version of ourself. It is beautiful to be seen and to witness others knowing that we are already whole individually and together.

Circles are also a place to explore— to share wonderings, dreams, struggles, curiosities. To begin to locate ourselves, and make meaning from the mundane.

There’s a lot stirring right now. We’d love to see you and hear about what’s happening in your world!

Link in bio.

Becoming a mother often leads us to reflect on our relationship with our own mother and the ways we were seen and supported (or not) by the women we come from. It is a potent time to digest what stories and patterns we want to pass on to our children and what we want to transform.

Healing happens through generations ❤️

📷:

The language we use matters. So much of our collective story about pregnancy has been co-opted, sanitized, medicalized, pathologized…

What does it sound like to reclaim your own experience? What words resonate in your body and soul? How do you talk about pregnancy?

We’d love to know! Reply in the comments below.

Becoming a mother is the ultimate hero’s journey.

During this time we are invited, not out into the world, but into the depths of ourselves. Within that inner landscape, we are asked to give up who we have been— our old stories, identities, certainties. We are asked to sit in the liminal space between worlds, to listen for who we are becoming.

This inner journey takes courage. It takes slowness and presence and care and curiosity. It takes community and cultivating a feeling of safety within yourself.

What is at stake is not power or status, but our own aliveness. Our relationship with all that exists in this world. Our belonging.

For so long, this inner journey has remained unspoken and unvalued. We haven’t had the language or the listeners to talk about what is most profound in our lives and to integrate the gold of our experiences.

BUT things are changing…

We are living into a new story where each of our voices has a place in the whole of who we are. Where each of our stories is sacred and has value. Where each of us belongs.

Join us around the fire this Thursday night to dive deep into mythology and ourselves! And to live into a new story of belonging.

Free event. Link in bio.

Grab your favorite blanket and a cup of tea and join us around the fire in 1 week for a night of myth and musing. We’ll be reading one of our favorite myths, La Loba, as told by

Myths invite us to venture out beyond the confines of our rational minds into vast landscapes of emotion, imagination, and meaning. They are potent tools for engaging our senses and bringing us into wild encounter with the whole of ourselves.

We’ll share how the structure of myths mirror the transformation of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum and why stories are especially potent tools for women in all phases of life.

Free event. Link in bio!

This poem was shared in our Grief Circle last night. It speaks to the ferocity of feminine wisdom— the courage it takes to show up to yourself and to life, not as you imagined it would be or think it should be, but exactly as it is, exactly as you are.

That is what we are tending, together. A world that is kind, inviting, compassionate. A world that welcomes our pain and grief just as readily as our joy and beauty. A world that says YES to everything. Yes to life.

It starts inside each of us.

This Sunday is the day! If you’re thinking about signing up, please join us for an exploration and honoring of grief.

Ashley Gates Jansen, a member of our Wisdom Council, will be holding space and guiding us through an embodied ritual to explore and honor grief, however it appears on our childbearing journeys. I’d you’re looking for support, connection, community, or just a safe container to explore or share what you’re carrying, this space is for you.

Link in bio.

In a culture so focused on ascending, it can be disorienting to travel downwards. But in times of transformation, this is exactly the direction we are invited to journey — beneath all externalities, down into the heart of who we really are.

It is a time to welcome the whole of ourselves, our beauty and our grief, our excitement and our fear. It is a time to tend to it all knowing that everything is welcome, everything belongs.

Join us Sunday for an exploration of grief. Link in bio.

To honor this season of grief, and the many forms grief can take on our childbearing journeys, we are holding a Grief Circle next Sunday October 16th at 6pm ET.

Any and all grief is welcome— grief over the loss of a child, pregnancy, or loved one, grief as it relates to fertility challenges, grief over unfulfilled expectations or desires, grief over a birth that didn’t go according to plan, grief for our former selves or way of life…

Ashley Gates Jansen, an elder and member of our Wisdom Council, will be holding space and guiding the circle. Ash says that grief is not meant to be merely endured— it is actually a presence meant to be engaged. And ideally engaged within community, so that we don’t have to carry it alone.

If you feel called to touch and explore the grief within you and be held and witnessed in a circle of others doing the same, we invite you to join us.

Link and details in bio.

What does the pregnant body teach us? It’s okay to slow down.

It might seem simple, but in our world, this is radical countercultural wisdom! What arises when you slow down? Anyone else experience feelings of fear, guilt, or unworthiness? Now is a great time to heal that sh@$.

Slowing down invites us into new awareness. Slowing down invites us into the consciousness of our body, and our emotions, and the natural world. Slowing down invites us into deep time and creative flow. It can change the way we breathe, it can change the way our brain processes information, it can change the way we relate to life.

The world is aching for this wisdom. Our children and families are aching for this wisdom. Let’s all take a lesson from the pregnant body and slow. down.

Let’s celebrate our need for sleep. Let’s celebrate our need to dream, and wonder and “do nothing.” Let’s discover what is possible when we honor our body’s intelligence.

Thank you to those of you who joined us for our first event in honor of new beginnings! Our elders say that a circle is complete when we have a child, an adult, and an elder gathered together and we feel so grateful to have had all generations present.

Some takeaways we are sitting with:
(1) new beginnings are often layered. Layers of different emotions can co-exist within us, as well as layers of stories and truths we are tending to. When we take time to slow down and listen, we become present to the deeper realities within us.

(2) it feels really good to touch your own body! It’s such a simple thing, but our hands can offer us nourishment whenever and wherever we need it— neck, heart space, womb space, hands. Taking time to center your own experience and offer yourself love and presence is powerful generational healing.

This week we’ll share a shortened version of our blessing ritual we hope you’ll try if you find yourself in need of nourishment.

Blessings for whatever new beginnings you may be tending in your own life 🙏🏼