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Hi friends,
{ words below are mostly penned by the wondrous wordsmith Lindsay Johnstone ! }We wanted to get this out to you ASAP so you can dig in over the weekend. This is the second part of our chat inspired by All Fours by Miranda July, which far more famous women than us implore you to read :
We talk about leaning in to the messiness of midlife; fear of what’s going on inside our bodies; our relationship to our sexual bodies and how midlife offers us an opportunity to (re)discover who we are and what we like. This post from Celeste Davis was mentioned more than once in the chat:
We dig into what it feels like to emerge from the oestrogen fug - what Dr. Susan Hardwick Smith calls the veil of oestrogen - and recognise that the mothering / caring part of us is evolving.
What can we / do we expect from grandmothers, too? The chat was on fire over maternal burnout and whether it breeds future generations of grandmothers who will be less available when there are (more) small people to take care of.
We talk about the conflicting information we’ve been told about testing for perimenopause and HRT and the complex landscape of women’s health generally, which can make it so hard to know what treatments to try to manage symptoms… Do we need to become our own doctor, too, as well as Jill-of-all-other-trades? One recommendation if you’re interested in going down a specific medical peri rabbit hole is The Menopause Brain by Dr. Louise Mosconi. And if you’re looking for a Substack to follow, Dr. Jen Gunter writes The Vagenda. Over on Instagram, check out The Menopause Sisters,Dr. Mary Clare Havers and Dr. Stacy Sims.
Lindsay’s hugely popular most about losing her orgasm has a wealth of advice in the comments:
And I share some thought about taking HRT in this post :
as well as some thought on returning to my body after my hysterectomy here:
Oh, also. We’re all moving to the Vale of Oestrogen which we have decided is a bucolic resort somewhere on the beautiful south-east coast of Wales.
If you’d like to continue the conversation, jump in to the comments, or head to this thread:
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Hello dear friends,
I’m sending this video by way of both introduction, and also as a way of telling you a little more about why I’m here on Substack, what my intentions for the beauty & bone community are and most importantly how I want this space to feel.
I’ve a special offer running until midnight tonight for my membership (GMT, Nov 9). The offer is for €20 a year for as long as you subscribe versus the usual €50. I will be putting my prices up next year (but you’ll still pay €20).
To get more of a feel for the membership, you can also check out my Membership Hub, but do come back for this offer, as it expires soon and I won’t run another at this price point again!
And for those of you who’ve watched the video - here is me an hour ago, SOAKED and filthy and happy as a gal can be!
Layla xx
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Fehlende Folgen?
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OK, let’s dive in to the second spiral of the Element Sessions, which is exploring
M E T A L
The Metal Element is connected to the season of Autumn, to a shedding, releasing, letting go. It is a deeply powerful time of the year. It was said in ancient China that the emperor would wait until Metal season to decide on which prisoners were to be release and which executed, because there was the greatest access to discernment and truth at this time. It is a a time of release, of return, of respect.
I wanted to begin this spiral by sharing a deep and wonderful conversation I had just yesterday with my dear friend and wisdom weaver Mari Kennedy. Mari is an Irish Celtic cyclical guide, a map maker and a global gatherer of women. Her passion is evolution, in particular of ‘women and our relationship to power and wisdom at this wild messy bewildering edge of evolution’.
Mari grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s in the West of Ireland at a time when most of us didn't question anything. She was the archetypal "high achieving good girl." In her late 30s, the Cailleach, the great Dark Feminine force in the Celtic tradition, upended her life. As Mari writes:
‘the Cailleach dragged me kicking and screaming onto the Path of Sovereignty, where she showed me that...I wasn’t in my bodyI didn’t have myselfI wasn't using my gifts. I was disconnected from nature I was playing small to stay secure...’
𓇸 We talk in this conversation about how Mari climbed back into her body and started to weave a new way of life.
𓇸 We talk about our avoidance and fear of the darkness, and of how we can with tenderness begin to move towards it more.
𓇸 We talk about our relationship to failure and vulnerability, about how uncomfortable with not knowing, with messiness and disruption.
𓇸 We talk about the collective Samhain and death our planet is going through at the moment and how the Celtic Wheel can help us navigate these times.
It was such a powerful, truthful and moving conversation with a dear friend and a woman who I know will open your heart to a radically new way of being.
You can find Mari on Instagram @marikennedywisdom or at www.marikennedy.com.
This is the first part of the METAL spiral. Here’s what’s coming up for the remainder of the spiral :
M E T A L Element Sessions
𖥸 Friday 1 November : Podcast will land in your inboxes with wisdom weaver Mari Kennedy (free for all subscribers)
𖥸 Friday 8 November : Deep Dive written post into the M E T A L Element will land in your inboxes (free preview, then access to paid subscribers)
𖥸 Thursday 14 November : 10:30-11:30am GMT: M E T A L live call (Paid subscribers). You’ll receive a link to the Zoom the day before, recording available).
Energetically connected, I’m also offering this series of four gatherings towards the end of the year.
Chatting to some of you on the last Element Sessions call, I was struck by the value of simply committing to sit for an hour together and write, pause, think, create. I extend an invitation to you all to sit with me for 4 early mornings towards the end of the year and do just that. I’m picturing a womb-space, a dark, warm holding space for us all.
Details are
𖥸 6-7am GMT𖥸 Friday 29 Nov, 6 Dec, 13 Dec, 20 Dec𖥸 On Zoom, I’ll send the link the day before. Will not be recorded.𖥸 Free to all paid subscribers
Layla xx
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Myself, Caro Giles, Lindsay Johnstone and Chloe George thoroughly enjoyed this thought-provoking chat, with a wonderful gathering of well over 30 of you, about how we are feeling at this wild time of mid-life.
We’d all read and adored Miranda July’s All Fours, and thought it would be a wonderful spring board from which to explore so many of the experiences we find ourselves having in our 40’s.
We spoke candidly about how we are feeling in our bodies now in our 40’s, what we are not ready to let go of, what we are grieving, what bothers us less, our motivations for taking care of ourselves now versus back in our twenties. We explored the idea of the male gaze, of how inescapable it feels almost despite ourselves …
We talked about being seen, about our fear of being invisible.
We talked about how hard it can be to navigate the transition between being a vibrant, sexual woman and the duties of domestic life and motherhood.
We talked about what awakenings we’ve had in our 40’s, and wondered whether there is more to come.
We didn’t get to speak enough about how the female body is seen, how this changes, or about anger and rage, or about HRT pros and cons. We didn’t talk enough about creativity or domesticity or what kind of older women we hope to become.
I’m fairly certain we’ll be doing more of these chats - they were fun, they were eye-opening, they felt helpful, they felt good to do and feedback from all of you seems to signal the same…. so watch this space! And do let us know in the comments below what you thought of our conversation, and what else you’d like to hear us discuss.
beauty & bone is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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I started taking HRT about two months ago. I was quite cross about starting to take it. I felt a little ashamed about it. A little bit like I’d failed. I’m also feeling remarkably, annoyingly, pretty great on it. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t piss me off quite a bit.
A voice recording of a post in which I explain why....
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Hi dear friends, Welcome to the second conversation in this series of slow seasonal explorations of the five elements : The Element Sessions.
Today, I’m sharing, for all subscribers, a glorious conversation I had with writer, mother, grower and holder Kerri ní Dochartaigh. (More on this below!)
Next Tuesday morning I’ll be holding a live workshop and journalling session focussing on the element of EARTH. I’m so looking forward to putting some faces to names and meeting some of you in person. If you are curious about the offering but not yet a paid subscriber, DM me and I’ll share access to this first session together as a taster gift of the year to come.
My wish for these sessions is they will provide us with an opportunity to explore, in all it’s messiness and confusion, what it means to be a human, living on the planet right now. I want to ask questions about how we can navigate this strange and tricky time we are living in together in new and radical, yet often very simple ways.
The framework for this exploration are the touchstones of each of the five elements of Earth, Metal, Water, Wood and Fire. I see these as jumping off points from which to explore the ideas above in a simple, real, manageable way.
I would like these sessions to be portals through which we can explore tenderly ideas around safety and gathering, grief and heartbreak, fear and longing, lust and joy, growth and anger.
I’d love for you to join me as these conversations and these explorations evolve and deepen.
Now! On to this week’s conversation… It has been a week of big realisations and tough truths for me. It has been a week of asking how, as I navigate so much loss, can I find ways to be held?It has been a week of really asking myself what is my relationship to the more than human world?Is there mothering and support offered by it? And if so, how, how, how, can I soften enough to let that in?
So many of these questions have arisen because of the conversation I had with Kerri ní Dochartaigh that I am sharing today.
Kerri is a writer, mother, holder and grower. She is the author of two beautiful books – Thin Places, which was awarded the Butler Literary Award and highly commended for the Wainwright prize for nature writing, and Cacophony of Bone which was longlisted for the Wainwright prize and was a Waterstones book of the year. She also writes regularly on her Substack newsletter Glimmers - a page dedicated to those sharp, bright moments of joy in our days and which meditates on why we need creativity, inspiration, and beauty; now more than ever. Kerri regularly runs OAK MOTHER - a free writing circle for mothers, MOSS MOTHER MOON - a women’s circle, as well as teaching and mentoring worldwide. Follow her here on Substack or on Instagram for updates on her offerings.
I asked Kerri to join me to discuss the EARTH element and what the idea of earth in all its forms has meant and means to her. I began our conversation together by sharing Kerri’s words from her essay titled Solas, Solace, which appears in the gorgeous collection of essays by Daunt Books In the Garden. Kerri writes:
I wish I’d known, long before now, that sowing is a way to grieve.As hands scatter seeds into earth beneath feet, they are really sculpting loss.With careful, repeated movements, the hands are moulding it into a thing like light on stone.
So we started here, with these perfect words, and with the word soil, and an hour of conversation flowed.
We talked about soil and safety and seeds, We talked about motherhood and mycelium,We talked about gardening and expectations and failure,We talked about outer space and time, We talked about broken bones and heartbreak,We talked about grace and grief.
I came away from it feeling like we had covered so much, but also that I could have asked her a thousand more questions and filled many more episodes.I’d love for you to take a listen and to let me know what it sparked in you?
A little more about The Element Sessions …If you are new to these sessions, you can read a little more about the structure of them here. You can also join me here for a deep dive slow deep dive in to E A R T H (ideas around Safety | Savour | Mothering | Gathering, including an audio version).
And you can listen to a fascinating conversation I had with five element acupuncture master practitioner Gerad Kite here.
Still to come in this first spiral of EARTH ::Tuesday 24 September | Live call (recording available) | E A R T H - reflections on transitions, gathering, harvesting, gratitude & safety.10-11am UTC + 1:00 (paid subscribers, you can subscribe here, or DM or emails me for free access as a taster gift)
Friday 27 September | Lyndsay Kaldor from Story & Thread guest post | Notes from the garden I’m so delighted to share this post with you - Lyndsay writes so thoughtfully on how the plants and flowers in particular are speaking to her in each season, I always find I look at my own garden and surrounding anew having read her posts. Lyndsay also has a beautiful new membership offering called The Beauty Thread, which is well worth checking out, she is offering so much here.
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I’m delighted to welcome you to The Element Sessions.
If you would like to follow along with this year long gentle exploration of the elements, please subscribe to my Substack beauty and bone.
I’m thinking of these slow, seasonal sessions as small pitstops in our year.
𖥸 Ways to pause, take a breath, take a look around.𖥸 See what is working for us, reflect on what is not.𖥸 Connect to different fundamental aspects of ourselves.𖥸 Be curious about what is challenging for us, absorb what has been good.𖥸 Be in community with other like-minded people.
During these sessions, I’m going to be talking to people from all walks of life about what each element means to them in their lives. But I wanted to begin this series and this year long journey with a conversation with Five Element Acupuncture master practitioner, author, podcaster and psychotherapist Gerad Kite. You can check out Gerad's website here, or follow him on Instagram here.
Gerad has been a mentor and teacher of mine for a number of years and I wanted to ask him to join us to give us a bird's eye overview of where the theory of the Five Elements comes from, why they're so fundamental to our lives, and how they can resource us and nourish us.
I found this to be an eye opening, at times perspective shifting and fascinating conversation.
In the couple of weeks since I had this conversation two things in particular have really stayed with me.
𖥸 Firstly Gerad talked about the Daoist philosophy of oneness and how important the recognition of the oneness of everything, in particular the oneness of humanity - is in Chinese medicine. The vibration of the Wood energy is what makes a tree, but is also the vibration that makes our livers, our skin, our nails. Not only that, he also points out that ‘your liver is my liver, but it's your liver because it differentiates as a unique manifestation within you. But the vibration of life that creates your liver or your heart or kidneys is the same as mine. And that's why we, as human beings and our relationship with animals and nature is very close, and we are totally dependent on each other, because we are one thing.’ I've taken so much from this concept in recent weeks - gently shifting my perspective on how and who I am in the world!
𖥸 Gerad also talks about the value of paying attention to what you are uncomfortable with in any particular season and therefore element - because there lies clues to where you may hold an imbalance, and therefore also the clues to potential change or healing.
This season of Earth / Late Summer for me is always both the most delicious time of the year (the berries! the light! the blustery wind! the surprise sun! the light! the light!) but also brings up deep, fundamental challenges and discomforts for me - around being able to really absorb and accept goodness in my life and a constant yearning for and simultaneous rejection of any form of mothering, from myself or from others.
These challenges for me, all the time, but in this season in particular, are coping mechanisms I have put in place to protect myself from heartbreak, and, I see now, are ones I need to find ways to open myself up to.
So dive, in take a listen, and let me know what you think?
Here’s what I have lined up for the next 10 days of The Element Sessions. Everything is designed to be listened to and accessed at your own pace ::
𖥸 Tuesday 17 September | Deep-dive newsletter into the Earth Element, complete with journalling prompts. (paid subscribers only)
𖥸 Friday 20 September | Podcast conversation with mother, writer and grower Kerri ní Dochartaigh (free to all subscribers)
𖥸 Tuesday 24 September | Live call (recording available) 10-11am UTC + 1:00 | E A R T H - reflections on transitions, mothering, harvesting, gratitude & safety (paid subscribers only).
𖥸 Friday 27 September | A wonderful surprise guest post - details to follow!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laylaomara.substack.com/subscribe -
In April 2020, at the age of forty one, I had a hysterectomy. It had been a long time coming. I’d been told at age thirty, after I’d had two big operations to remove aggressive fibroids from in, on and around my uterus, that I would probably need to have my womb removed at some later stage. The surgeries I had back then were in many ways a stop-gap, a way of holding back time long enough for me to be able to try and conceive. Which in and of itself seemed like a long shot – post the two operations I had a 50 / 50 change of getting pregnant. Which was better than the 0% chance I had with the fibroids distorting my womb, but they still weren’t great odds. Plus, I was single.
But I managed it. I walked out of the doctor’s surgery with my prognosis that day and went to meet a scarlet-haired friend at a red-bricked French restaurant across the street from where I worked. Sitting at the bar with an American singer and an Australian base-player sat my future husband. The Australian would eventually marry B and I on an island in Croatia with our backs to the ocean and our feet dipping in the cool water of a swimming pool. My scarlet haired friend would wear a tight sleek bob and a long white dress. The American musician would wear his curly black hair wild in a halo around his kind face.
Layla O’Mara’s Beauty & Bone is a reader-supported publication. Writing these words takes time. I am deeply grateful to all paid subscribers for their support.
I managed to carry and birth three babies too, managed it by the skin of my teeth. Black and blue after the first one. On bedrest for two months with the second, my placenta stuck to my womb during delivery. On the third I bled from eighteen weeks until I delivered two months early having spent three months in hospital. But my womb and I did it. With luck, grit, determination, bull headedness, and a touch of miracles. But she was tired after it all, my womb. Tired and distorted and bulbous with the tumorous growths of fibroids returned. I was tired, too. And acutely sore. And I bled, my god did I bleed and bleed and bleed. It wasn’t much fun.
I went for multiple opinions from surgeons and women’s health experts and nutritionists and healers and you name it I’ve done it. Looking for a way out, a way around it, a secret cure. A fix. The final surgeon I went to see, the man who would eventually perform the operation, kept using the word ‘reasonable’ during my consultation. A hysterectomy would be a very reasonable choice. It would be very reasonable for me to have my womb removed. Which it was: I was in a state and nothing else had made a blind bit of difference to my condition. But somehow this doctors insistence on my reason, on how logical and sensible it was to make this choice, unsettled me. I didn’t feel ready in my body, even if I could justify it intellectually. Employing my reason felt like I was forcing my own hand, overriding something in myself. It was hard to explain.
A few weeks after my ‘reasonable doctor’ consultation I began to have a strange sense of something on the tip of my tongue. I had the continual sense there was something there at the periphery of my vision that I kept missing, that kept slipping away, sidling out of view. This went on for a week, maybe two, until one morning, as I reached for a cup to pour my morning coffee I finally caught sight of what it was I had been nearly seeing. It wasn’t quite a vision, it more of a strange inner knowing. And what I knew in that moment was that my womb was an octopus. An amorphous, otherworldly, ungraspable creature of the dark and the deep. Which I realise sounds a little bit bonkers, but this realisation made complete and utter corporeal, somatic sense to me. It was one of those moments in life where suddenly everything aligns.
Ahhhhhhhhhh said my cells.
A few weeks previously I had watched a documentary about an octopus and the relationship this small common cephalopod formed with a free diver who visited her every day for a year. It was a beautiful film, which (spoiler alert!) concludes with the octopus becoming pregnant and, as is the natural cycle for these creatures, slowly disintegrates and degenerates as she tends to the thousands of eggs she has lain in the darkness of her den. Eventually she dies, and her now almost translucent body is carried away in the jaws of a shark, her tentacles trailing in the fish’s wake like a silk scarf fluttering in the breeze.
I had watched this film tucked up beside B in bed after the children had fallen asleep, the rain thrumming softly on the tin roof of our home. I’d watched it and enjoyed it and thought little more about it. But somehow, this film and these final scenes in particular had embedded themselves deep in my subconscious. Slowly, with gentle nudges, my brain offered up this deeply physical metaphor as a way for me to understand the choice I had to make.
My beginning to see my womb as an octopus helped me to understand that the space in which my womb existed was dark, murky, a velvet shadowland. I could drop all those ‘healing lights’ I’d been trying to beam into her cave. She was a creature of the deep. The octopus also helped me to see that whilst my womb had mended and held and contained and nurtured again and again, there is a moment, too when it is time to let go, to conclude.
A whole third of the book I’ve written explores this experience in more depth, so there is a lot to unpack. But what I have returned to this week in my reading and listening and writing is a journey into a deeper understanding of the brain that resulted from this experience. I was and continue to be fascinated by what went on in my consciousness to reveal such a profound, bodily, complete understanding. It felt numinous, it felt otherworldly, it felt like a visitation. That said, I didn’t quite believe that a dead octopus from a Netflix documentary had appeared to me in my kitchen on a rainy Tuesday morning with a message about my womb, no matter how much it felt that way.
A few months after the octopus-vision, I listened to a talk by parent educator and psychologist Steve Biddulph. He described an experience he had while grieving a pregnancy he and his wife had lost. He spoke about how he was unable to process the grief, even though, as a trained mental health professional, he ‘knew’ all about it. He described an experience he had one evening sitting out in a barn on his land. He picked up a guitar leaning against the wall and began to idly strum. The chords started to form a shape, create a pattern almost without his knowing; his fingers took on a life of their own. Gradually the chords began to sound familiar to him, a song he knew well for the last twenty years emerged. the words of this song spoke profoundly to his locked-in grief. He began to cry for the first time since the loss of his child months before. His mind, allowed to wander and strum, arrived at a song and lyrics that allowed his stuck emotions to begin to move. The way Biddulph described this experience was precisely how I experienced the octopus appear. This was something that felt both entirely created by my brain, it felt like she crawled out of my mind’s eye, and also one which felt more than, mystical, the octopus seemed also to swim towards me. And so I wrote to Biddulph to ask him to explain his experience a little more. I wanted, specifically, to know more about the neuroscience of it all, what might be happening in my brain. How it could overlap and overlay in this way. He replied to explain that he thought it was about how our right brain (in most people, sometimes it is reversed) does the big picture knowing, on a purely animal level. He wrote about how the wild creature part of us is actually very complex, multi-dimensional, and at ease with symbols, metaphors and all the things that don’t fit easily into logical sense (which of course is most of the important things in life).
On Biddulph’s recommendation, I researched the work of psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr Iain Mc Gilchrist who has written extensively on what he calls the ‘divided brain’. In his seminal book The Master and His Emissary Mc Gilchrist describes in remarkable detail the workings of the brain, outlining the necessary separation of the left and right hemispheres in almost all animals, right back to the Startlet Sea Anemone 700 million years ago. He asserts that it is not, as was mistakenly believed for a time in the late 1960’s and ‘70’s, that the two hemispheres of the brain do two different jobs, but rather that each hemisphere attends to what it is observing in an entirely different way. The left hemisphere is very literal, it takes everything very seriously, receiving information almost as if it were a computer. Its view is exclusive, analytic and fragmentary. It focuses on the ‘either/or’. The right hemisphere is much more in touch with our embodied being, with our emotions and with our physical self. Its view is inclusive, integrative. It is comfortable with ‘both/and’. It is at home with the and yet. Both hemispheres are vital to our functioning in the world, but it is Mc Gilchrist’s assertion that in a well-functioning brain, the right hemisphere should play the role of ‘the Master’, and the left hemisphere should act as ‘ the Emissary’, acting on and making manifest the right brains complex interpretation and understanding.
I needed a right hemisphere ‘octopus understanding’ of my surgery to help me inform and embed the more logical, left brain reasoning. In the end, I came to the same conclusion that the consultant had offered, that I should have a hysterectomy, but it was a full-bodied choice, it came from a deep inner understanding. One could argue that this made no practical difference to the end result – there was still a knife, still a cut, still an organ removed. But for me, there was a profound otherness to this operation (I had had six other operations on my womb prior to this, so I have some reference points). It meant that when I went in for the surgery – during Covid with all those added concerns and restrictions – I journeyed through it as a healing act, as a ritual of sorts. In the nights after the operation I slowly, tenderly walked the corridors of the old hospital, watching foxes slipping down alleyways, birds lifting the days from the dark with their song. I saw my womb leaving me like the octopus at the end of the film, disintegrating into the ocean, a silk scarf waving goodbye.
There is an enormous amount to unpack in Mc Gilchrist’s theory of the divided brain. Next week, in part two, I will explore his theory that Western society has become dangerously left-brain dominant, as well as thinking about the importance of how and where we place our attention.
Layla O’Mara’s Beauty & Bone is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laylaomara.substack.com/subscribe -
One evening, about six months before I decided to say yes to a hysterectomy that had been recommended to me for some time (for constant, teeth grating, breath taking pain, collossal amounts of blood, bloating, pain during sex, & more), I got into bed beside my husband, we opened the laptop and we watched a documentary about an octopus. The film charted a relationship that unfolded between a small, common octopus and a man struggling to make sense of his life. Over the period of a year, the octopus and the man formed a remarkable bond with each other, deep down on the ocean floor in an underwater kelp forest. We got to know a mercurial creature who could grow horns, match colour, texture, pattern to her surroundings, shift from spiky to smooth, cover herself in armour, run, dart, dance like an old lady in a flamenco skirt. She did all of this in a heartbeat, with the swell of a wave, her body just knew. It was a beautiful, affecting film.
About two weeks later I was at the kitchen sink when I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. A flash that I nearly grasped and then it was gone. It was a slippery, seaweed like thing. This continued for days, a flash of something coming out of the dark, watching me, looking for my attention, but then it would disappear. It had the sense of something on the tip of my tongue.
And then one morning, as I reached down for a coffee mug in a drawer, this slippery shadow of a thought slid out of her den. I suddenly saw her whole form. I knew that it was her. The octopus. It had been her eye, peeking out of the darkness. It was her, a fluid, amorphous being, pouring out of her velvet cave-bed to say hello. I hovered with my hand on the mug in the drawer, afraid to move too much, to think too hard in case I scared this vision away.
As I hovered I knew on some cellular, primal level that this octopus was also my womb. Somehow this animal, this shape-shifting alien of the deep, was also my aching uterus. The map of me overlayed the map of her. I straightened up, coffee cup still in my hand, my pelvis settling over my legs. I suddenly understood why, in the endless meditations I had been doing, I had been unable to bring a blinding wash of bright into this bone bowl. I understood for the first time that this crucible needed to be dark – it needed to be murky and filled with wafts of kelp rising from cracks on the ocean floor. My womb-world was not, I saw, a bright, technicolour place, the lights did not need to be switched on. This was a dark, inky, velvet space. And it was a space that was, for the first time, alive. Pulsing. Undulating. It was a space from which this octopus, this octopus womb, had stretched out a tentacle and wanted to commune. She had things she wanted to say.
This experience made no logical sense to me, but it felt extraordinarily true. Jig-saw piece, Tetris-line true.
A few weeks later, I listened to a talk by parent educator and psychologist Steve Biddulph. He described an experience he had whilst grieving a pregnancy he and his wife had lost. He spoke about how he was unable to process the grief, even though, as a trained mental health professional, he ‘knew’ all about it. He described an experience he had one evening sitting out in a barn on his land. He picked up a guitar leaning against the wall and began to idly strum. The chords started to form a shape, create a pattern almost without his knowing; his fingers took on a life of their own. Gradually the chords began to sound familiar to him, a song he knew well for the last twenty years emerged. He began to cry for the first time since the loss of his child months before. His mind, allowed to wander and strum, arrived at a song and lyrics that allowed his stuck emotions to begin to move. Something was unlocked.
The way Biddulph described this experience was precisely how I experienced the octopus. This was something that felt both entirely created by my brain, it felt like she crawled out of my mind’s eye, and also one which felt more than, mystical, the octopus seemed also to swim towards me. And so I wrote to Biddulph to ask him to explain his experience a little more. I wanted, specifically, to know more about the neuroscience of it all, what might be happening in my brain. How it can overlap and overlay in this way.
He replied to explain that he saw it as being about how our right brain (in most people, sometimes its reversed) can do this big picture knowing, on a purely animal level. He wrote that the wild creature part of us is actually very complex, multi-dimensional, at ease with symbols, metaphors, and all the things that don’t fit easily into logical sense. (Which of course is most of the important things in life).
On Biddulph’s recommendation, I researched the work of psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist describes in remarkable detail the workings of the brain, outlining the necessary separation of the left and right hemispheres in almost all animals, right back to the Startlet Sea Anemone 700 million years ago. He describes how the right hemisphere’s view is inclusive, integrative. It is comfortable with ‘both/and’. It is at home with the and yet. The left hemisphere’s view is exclusive, analytic and fragmentary. It focuses on the ‘either/or’.
Both hemispheres are vital to our functioning in the world, but,it is Mc Gilchrist’s assertion that Western civilisation has grown to place far too much value and emphasis on the ways of the left hemisphere – needing always to be right, grasping for immediate solutions, casting aside anything that does not make logical sense, or that does not fit with what it thinks it knows. He proposes that our whole society has for thousands of years neglected the more synthetic, contradictory, nebulous ways of the right hemisphere.
Click, click, click, Tetris sense.
The wild creature side of me understood that the octopus was what I needed to decipher my womb, to come to terms with her removal. The wild creature side of me brought the octopus to the tip of my tongue, to the edges of my vision.
I’ve experienced this alchemy with my surroundings, or with something I’ve seen, in other ways too. My therapist works very somatically, and so when she notices that I have become activated by something I have said, she asks me often to look around the room until my eye settles on something that I am drawn to. I am always surprised what I settle on - in a very calm, tastefully decorated room, I’ve been drawn to a) a dirty plug socket b) an ugly clock c) how the lamp light fell on a corner of the ceiling. But each of these items, when I’ve spent some time describing them and considering why I’ve been drawn to them, has opened up something powerful and deeply supportive for me. The plug told me I needed simplicity, routine, domesticity while I worked my way through something, the ugly clock was shaped in such a way as to signal a holding whilst also a granting of space, the lamp light told me, somehow, that everything was not going to fall apart.
Intentional walks, known as Immram, that I have taken as part of my beautiful friend Mari Kennedy’s Next Stage Celtic Wheel have also shown me what I needed to know. Or maybe it is that I’ve allowed enough space for my subconscious, or perhaps my right brain’s wisdom, to surface. Walking once with the question of where I should go with my business, I came across a rotten tree stump, which had decomposed so that the upper half was ok, but the lower half was completely disintegrating, holding the rest up in an unsustainable, precarious way. Seeing that helped me register deep in my bones what I had known for some time, but had been avoiding - that the way I was working was neither sustainable, nor would it lead to true, luscious, healthy growth.
Each time this happens to me, it feels like magic, it feels like such a powerful form of alchemy. But actually, I’ve come to now think it is even more beautiful than this. It is having conversations with my environment in a pre (post?) cognitive, pre (post?) verbal way, it is stilling myself enough that truths I know already are animated in the landscape, and then refolded back into me.
I’ll write some more another time about what it was the octopus had to tell me.
Layla x
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Can I be deeply honest with you for a moment? I am becoming less and less interested in talking about motherhood. Which, yes, I realise is a little strange for someone who has talked about little else on her socials for the last couple of years…
Let me explain.
As humans we naturally are drawn to a pack, to a ‘tribe’ - and motherhood is no different. It is comforting to feel seen and recognised and part of a community that is just like you.
But there are problems with this too.
For starters, for all those a pack includes, it also excludes just as many. I can still remember the gut-punch I felt for nearly two and a half years as I walked by the park near my home in Berlin and watched all the gloriously happy, perfect mothers and their gleaming Bugaboos swanning about, whilst myself and my husband tried and failed and tried and failed to conceive. I felt decidedly outside the pack.
I can also remember observing in myself how quickly and willingly, when I did conceive, I leapt across what had previously seemed to me an unbridgeable divide between those with babies and those without.
And then once I became a card-carrying mother, I found that the pack I had so eagerly joined wasn’t so gilt-edged from the inside. Well, actually, it was even MORE gilded from within.
The pack I had joined, although I didn’t know it at the time, was one that exemplified a patriarchal version of motherhood. It was a straight-jacket glue gunned with semi-precious jewels and distracting gleaming baubles. It insisted that I be
BusyTogether ProductiveCalmGood
And because I felt like I wanted to belong, I tried very hard to fit in. I baked and I googled and I signed up and I joined and I self-cared and I volunteered. And I made lists and lists and lists. But it was a pretty imbalanced and prescriptive club, this patriarchal motherhood, and so I always felt a little out of place, like I never quite belonged. I felt lonely, I felt pissed off, angry, often without having a clue as to why. Not unlike how I felt walking by all those mothers in the park before I conceived.
When I look at the group of women in my life that I have ended up being drawn to, those I have formed beautiful, deep friendships with, it is notable how many of them are women who are not mothers to their own children. I don’t know why this is, but I do know that the healing and the shedding and the evolution that we are going through has far more in common than it has not.
I’ve come to think of it like an onion. Each of us has had to peel back layers. Many of those most external layers are those of societal conditioning, internalised patriarchies and patterns.
What it means to be a mother, what it means if you are not a mother, what are our expectations of success, what it means to be a ‘good girl’, or a ‘good mother’. All of this is Patriarchal Motherhood, with a big dirty capital M.
And here is where matrescence comes in. In my conversation with Amy Taylor Kabbaz I shared a couple of weeks ago, I asked her about the spiritual nature of matrescence (listen back, she is so great on it). This is for me the molten core of it all, this is the heart of the onion. This is the Beauty and the Bone, and it is where I want to hang out, what I want to explore.
It is the same deep molten work that many of my other friends who are not mothers are doing. It isn’t that we are so very different, it is rather that societal, patriarchal norms and expectations are dividing us into different packs.
But we can’t start here, at the rich deep communal heart of things. To get even close, we have to peel a few layers of the onion back first. We have to shed, grieve, compost.
So that’s what we are going to do for the rest of this issue. Pick apart the conditioning, start to see how we have internalised it, and begin to realise how much of it is quite simply just not our s**t to carry.
Next week, we are going to start peeling back those onion layers when I share 5 ways that Patriarchal Motherhood sets us up for failure and divides us from our sisters.
What I’m going to share shifted an enormous amount for me in terms of how I saw my role as a mother, why I was feeling the way I was, why my relationship was struggling, why I felt so lost. I hope they help you as much as they helped me.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laylaomara.substack.com/subscribe -
In this conversation we talk about ::* Amy’s own story of realising that she could no long manage to continue to be the same woman she was before having her children and how it took a near pregnancy loss for her to realise that she needed to begin to let go of much she had held on to for so long* How she searched for and did not find an explanation for the massive changes she felt she was going through as a mother
Amy also shares some incredible insights in to ::* why it is that so many of us find it so hard to slow down and let go of who we were before giving birth
* what self-silencing is and why it has been one of the greatest turning points of her own understanding of matrescence
* what the spiritual nature of matrescence is and how it is this aspect of mothering that has the potential to, quite literally, change the world.
About Amy Amy Taylor Kabbaz is an author (of the best-selling Mama Rising), host of the ‘The Happy Mama Movement’ podcast, international award-winning course facilitator and coach and in 2019, she launched her world first Matrescence Facilitator Training, sharing her unique formula of coaching and support for a mother’s transition through matrescence.
You can follow Amy on Instagram or check out her website.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laylaomara.substack.com/subscribe
