So many women tell me how they wish they would’ve known about the art of traditional postpartum care when they were having babies.
There is grief around the not having.
There is shame around the not knowing.
There is a longing to have a do-over.
There often feels like there are loose ends that need to be tied up from birth.

Although we cannot go backwards in time, I believe we can open up timelines to hold and feast the new mothers we once were. Life is not linear.

Women are cyclical in nature.
We ebb and flow.
We have access points where we can enter that postpartum space every single month.

It is when we begin our monthly cycles, or, if you no longer bleed you can use the new moon as a marker. The formula for tending to a new mother is more or less the same formula that we can apply to the time that we are menstruating. We can go back, go in, and care for our own postpartum bodies and spirit.

We can rest and move at a slower pace
We can eat warm and deeply nourishing and restorative foods
Call on the herbal allies
Keep our feet and body warm
Body oil
Practice profound self care
Be reflective in our heart and spirit … and so on.

This is the time to reach out your hand to your maiden-turned-mother self and love her. Issues surrounding birth and birth trauma can also be confronted in this space.

It is a way for us to integrate, initiate, honour and connect to the new mothers we were. You can go as deep with it as you wish.

We are both powerful and also the most vulnerable at this time, and so retreating while filling our bodies with restorative care and rest is ever so potent. We can recreate the golden hour into a golden day, and emerge into the world reborn.

Many of us have had less than ideal passages into motherhood, but we are not incapable of making peace with that crossroad. We can tie up loose ends and also get honest with how our needs were not met.

Allow the unprocessed to process.

Trust your instincts to guide you.

It’s the micro and macro, and we can heal it all.

“If you want to know where your power really is, you need to look no further than the processes of your body that you’ve been taught to dismiss, deny, or be afraid of.”
– Dr. Christiane Northrup