Losing Yourself to Mum-life

She walks into my treatment room, sits down and sighs. She’s exhausted, she feels alone, she hates her body, she is confused about who she is and what she wants to do. “I just want to go back to the old me.” But she’s also so in love with this little person she has created and marvels at what she has received in return for all she feels she has lost. This is a story of just one client, but a story owned by so many others. This is mum life.

I’ve been seeing this client for a couple of months now. From our first session, it was clear that she was waiting for life to go back to “normal” after having her first child. She kept trying to regain her spark. In fact, I hear that a lot from clients – they feel like they’ve lost their spark at times in their life. Not just mums. But it seems that at times in our life when something or someone has taken a larger priority that our Selves, we can end up feeling like that like our inner essence is simply now lost.

Hers is not an unusual case for a first-time mum. The missing piece of the puzzle is nobody tells you that when you give birth to a baby, you also give birth to a new you – the mother. According to Women Love Power, the Mother archetype represents the caretaker within us. The risk with the Mother is that they often place their own needs ahead of their own and find it difficult to establish boundaries. So, with the birth of the Mother, she now needs to learn who she is, as well as learning all about this new baby.

Rather than looking at this from the viewpoint that she has lost something, she needs to look at her new role as a reason she has gained so much more. It’s easy, so easy for us to focus on lack. It’s just how our brains are wired – we are constantly looking for things that are wrong or negative. In survival terms, we are looking for ‘danger’. But the danger these days is not an animal predator, such as a lion chasing after us. The danger today, or our predators today, are the ones we usually create in our own mind. The stories that we are not enough and therefore we aren’t loveable. Our primal brain sees this as rejection and to be rejected by the tribe means we are all alone and nobody can survive alone.

But you have a choice not to give in to your primal brain’s stories…

So if we can practice shifting our focus to more of an abundance mindset, this automatically lifts us. One thing every mother gains is a new little teacher in their lives. Being a mother is an opportunity to learn about ourselves and what we really want and who we really want to be. It’s not a reason to find our old spark, but a reason to create a new one. When we truly stop and take the time to get to know who the mother is, rather than focusing so much on our old Self, we begin to realise what has actually changed in our lives and perhaps realise that we have to – and that’s okay.

When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I studied my Reiki Level 2 (Second Degree) and I also started Nourished Energy as an Instagram page. I didn’t have any big plans to change my job then, and I didn’t think that I would ever work in this space. But becoming a mother didn’t narrow my focus, it widened it to believe in possibility. Birth and motherhood itself is evidence of the magic of infinite possibility. If an entire Universe can be created in my womb, what else do I have the power to create?

Of course, becoming a mother also created fears I had never experienced before. Because the vulnerability of trusting that something will, first of all, happen (conception and getting pregnant) and be a success (going to full term and baby surviving) wreaks havoc on you. I clutched onto my heart many times throughout the process of becoming a mother and I still do. Each time a child is sick or bumps their head. I tell my girls that they make my heart so full of love it’s going to explode and tiny hearts will come out of my chest one day. That’s how vulnerability feels for me – the risk of my heart actually exploding.

Being a mother has been the scariest thing I have ever done. Required the most amount of vulnerability. I have had to trust and let go and have faith that this is their journey as well as mine. For someone who loved to be in control all her life, this has been a huge learning curve for me. I am grateful that at the same time I started the journey to become a mother, I was also truly stepping into my Reiki journey. Reiki has taught me to let go. To trust. To relinquish control and just go with it. It’s allowed me to truly feel magic. Let go of trying to control because the Universe is a much much more powerful creator than you. Just think about how the Universe created the process of birth. Trust in the power of its imagination.

Trust in the process of learning who you are now. Embracing the changes of motherhood and leaning in to the infinite possibility they have created for you. By becoming a mother, you’ve also been through your own rebirth, take the time to learn about your new Self and enjoy getting to know your new little teacher.

In love and light

Loretta xo