womb story
Ladies, have you ever visited your womb?
What was happening in there? Was it nurturing a child? Was it nurturing you as a baby? Perhaps it was bleeding? Was it fecund, fertile with earthworm rich soil, ripe with ovulation? Was it dark & barren or filled with light? Perhaps it had sticky ancestral fingers all over it….
When we enter an unconscious state, usually through meditation (I use drum beats to provoke introspective meditation), we have the ability to enter our wombs to listen to the stories it has to tell.
Each time I do this, the experience varies significantly.
One time, when I was pregnant with my second child, I visited my womb in a drumming journey. I was excited with childlike curiosity… ready to unlock fertile, fleshy pink images and maybe have a meet & greet with the baby that was growing in there. But oddly enough, all I discovered in there was a brick wall. WTF.
It was arresting.
After some initial shock & disappointment at discovery of such a grotesque monument in ma womb-town, I decided to sit with it and just keep observing what arose. The beating drum sunk my bones deep into the floor as I reflected back to my first pregnancy, birth, child. I immediately felt a sadness arise within my body. My heart felt heavy and out of place. I felt like I wanted to run away from my body, abandon it. The initiation into motherhood had been a hard blow. Lots of sitting in my shadow, feeling alone and creating boundaries. An ugly split. Guilt and shame fermented in me. I had felt like a palace guard protecting my king, spear in hand & ready to fight.
Brick wall didn’t really seem so out of place now did it?
The process was unravelling and cathartic. I spent some time contemplating this part of myself that I had somehow completely overlooked. In a second session, I re-entered my womb and approached the brick wall. I had work to do. Brick-by-brick, with my own (metaphoric) bare hands, I started to slowly disassemble the wall. This wall that had kept me & my baby ‘protected’ was the same wall that kept love and trust out of my life. I cried because it felt brave and unsafe. But I kept pulling them down one-by-one until finally the wall was gone.
Though I did leave a few bricks… they were after all part of my story. These last few bricks were a reminder of what the wall had provided me when I had needed it most: a sense of security, freedom from co-dependent behaviour and the ability to see that I can be tenacious and fierce.
When the drumming stopped, I came-to, wrote it out, then I sat in ritual. I thanked this brick wall that had become such a definitive part of my womb & my story for so long and then I let it go.
It was time to find my softness, without losing my strength.
The seed of our creativity is birthed from our wombs. Do we connect enough and revere how sacred & magic these vessels of procreation are? And in the same token do we honour the shadow of our wombs? Our ancestral or personal shame that dwells there, our trauma, pain and fears?
The voice of our intuition speaks from our womb. If we can connect with the stories of our wombs, then we only have to listen to its message. And this, my friends, is when we pick up our tools and we draw, sketch, paint, sing, dance or write. This is an important part of your story, our collective story and like all stories they need to be told.
**Excited to announce I will be bringing some beautiful non-conventional creative art therapy sessions to the women of the Byron Shire area in the new year**
#womb #story #brickwall #drummedicine #creativity #heartcraft #wordcraft #intuition