For the Mamas who want to love their bodies after babies, but just don’t…

Happy Moonday.  I want to connect around how hard our relationship can be with our bodies after we have babies.

After I had each of my babies, I ate and drank and ate and drank in those early months. The isolation, the exhaustion, the loss of my life and my life force was too much to bear without the reprieve of numbness a few times a day.

And the scariest thing was that I excused it because it was “ok” that I looked overweight after having babies.

I kept telling myself that I “had just had a baby!” be easy on myself.

Although I was rejecting the patriarchal norm that women should lose the baby weight right away, that rejection was still keeping me in the land of “what I look like is the only thing that matters.”

Because I was only focused on what I looked like (even though I knew better – I had been teaching about patriarchy and emotional eating for almost a decade, sometimes the brainwashing is too strong, especially when you’re sleep deprived) I was ignoring the disordered eating and drinking that was happening on a daily basis.

Then of course, with any brainwashed woman, I just tried to change my eating, but the all too familiar force that came over me when there was a bottle of wine on the table or ice cream in the freezer took over, and there was nothing I could do to stop myself.

That force was desperately seeking love, comfort, stability, joy and ESCAPE in food and alcohol. All things that felt so far away during that time.

With each of my three children, it got a bit better as I learned more and more what a postpartum mother needs for support, but the truth is that I never really healed those patterns in the early months, and since I am done having children, I will never have that chance.

What did happen is that as the pressure of taking care of an infant eased over time, and I started sleeping more, the journey out of my emotional hole wasn’t so great, and I had just enough extra energy to look at why I felt so stuck and miserable.

After I had Hazel, I tried my old tricks around emotional eating, but I still found myself polishing off half a pint of dairy free ice cream while watching Outlander, and skipping my workouts even though I was so determined the night before to follow through.

One day I came over to my Temple and started dancing.  The only movement I was doing was workout videos (that I mostly skipped for scrolling on instagram).  As I moved my body to the music, I felt rivers of mud slosh around my insides, and dark clouds start to spiral in my head.

I had spent enough time in Temple as a Priestess to know I had awakened my inner shadow and given her permission to come forward, just by the simple act of dancing.

As I continued to move and lose myself in the music, I started to sob, then scream and finally in a fit of rage I threw up 5 times on the floor. It was like an exorcism.

Like a movie, I saw scenes from becoming a Mother flash before my eyes. All the times I felt deep pain, but kept it in to stay strong and keep it together for my kids, rolled through my consciousness and out of my body with every scream or pound on the floor with my fists.

Finally, I moved through everything that was meant to come out of me in that moment. I rose up from the vomit strewn floor, like a warrior, wrecked and wrung out, but victorious after a battle.

In that moment, I learned that my body hadn’t betrayed me, she was protecting me.

She was my fortress.

As I walked home through the woods, I felt lighter, and I knew that the weight I had carried, had nothing to do with fat.

In the coming months, I approached my body as a Sacred Home, one that housed so much of other people’s energy and protected me from feeling pain. I released my psychic weight through ceremony and establishing new boundaries and patterns in my relationships. I healed my addiction to food and alcohol through feeding my soul directly with my spiritual practice. I learned to feed my desires with actual pleasure and healed my story about how Mothers aren’t supposed to be sexy.

To be honest, I have never felt more sexy, alive, sacred and juicy than I do right now.

It’s been a profound journey, and on Wednesday, I’m going to be sharing how I can support you in going through your own initiation in remembering that your body is your Sacred Home.

Space is limited in this new container I’m creating, so make sure you to make time to read my email on Wednesday.

Love,

Sarah