Part of me wants to delete the title. The art of showing up to a blank page with the intention of sharing ways of being in a complicated world and naming the answer to be simple is bold. Or it feels bold to my current nervous system. We can have different truths.

I recently told a client that I too get mad at the process of my work. She looked at me wide in her eyes and held her breath: Let’s be clear. I love my work. Recently, I had to ask myself if I would do this work even if the perceived benefit was not there aka I was not “making money” and the answer is still yes. Yes, I will continue to fully show up for the clients who come across my path. Yes, I will continue to distill down complicated practices so that they are simple and understood by women and couples so that they may create a thriving life even when I can’t see the clearest path in front of me. These tools are needed back in the hands of ordinary human beings.

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So why did I share that I too get mad at this process? I shared because the work I am walking her through is not sexy. The work is not instagramable. The work is not flashy and sometimes it is not even tangible.

You know what this work is though? It is a repeatable process that you can use at any point in your life once you have mastered it. You can start to understand yourself and be guided to turn your ordinary days into days that are flowy and even your hard days you start to understand are showing you something on your path that is asking to be understood.

I wear a running watch because I am a runner and it counts my steps. I have worked very hard to detach from needing to hit a certain number of steps a day though it is something I check in and see how much I did. The watch doesn’t run me, I work with it as the tool it is. The attachment to good or bad and the attachment to my perceived self-worth from my accomplishment is not there. With that in mind…somedays I choose to make sure I hit my goal. Why? Because it feels damn good to hit goals.

So here we were last Friday night and I was 40 steps away from my goal as I climbed into bed. Some days I let it go but that night I checked in and decided I wanted to hit the goal and so I walked around the house and as I did that I saw the pink sky at 10:15pm. Pink sky?!? I ran outside to see the sky in many different colors purple, pink, and green lying amongst the stars and the moon. I was so thankful in that moment. Sure the internet says it wasn’t real and you get to believe what you want to believe… my decision to hit that goal led me to see something I have never seen before and that is magic.

Here is why this story matters: my running watch is not in the spirit of mindfulness. The act of “needing” to hit that goal is also perceived as not mindful and yet it led to a moment of deep gratitude and peace. WHY? Because I allow myself to change and ebb and flow and I do the daily unsexy work of mastering my mind and my emotions.

I know that emotions are information. I know that I will change and evolve as time goes on and I know that life is full of tools that we as humans have assigned meaning too.

But what does this have to do with simplicity vs confusion? Everything. When I get lost in the confusion or the shoulds of how to be in this world aka attached to my beliefs about how things are…I can no longer make sense of what’s true to me.

If I had fought myself to hit my step goal because “productivity is bad” or “hustle culture is hurting the planet” I would have gone to bed feeling bad about myself because I wanted something that others told me was bad and I denied myself what I really wanted in that moment. I created confusion. When I checked in and did what I felt I wanted to do I created space for life to unfold for me.

When you are in a state of confusion I urge you NOT to make a choice. In fact, I urge you to slow down and either get quiet or do what you have to to distract yourself from your thoughts in that moment. Once you are quiet, once you are back in your body THEN ask the question or don’t…because the real answer will always be simple and you will know when you know.

I have been on a personal quest to understand the link between spirituality and motherhood. Working with mothers, observing mothers, and being a mother I can see the spiritual journey (I am using this to define the journey of one’s soul) that each one is on, and yet because they are mothers in a modern world they have little to no capacity, quite frankly energy left to share the answers of the universe with anyone.

Yes, I am saying that mothers hold the secrets of the universe. It is a great irony of life. Here you are a portal between two worlds and you create life inside of you. You create life inside of you simply by being and then you break open to hold this new capacity you have never held. You do all this while still being a functioning human in modern society. So yes, mothers hold the secrets to the universe, and yet…

One of the first times I met a dear friend of mine I was telling her about my career and how I work with women. She said she loved the way I thought about therapy and helping women except “it’s not actually about motherhood”.

To this day I still come back to that thought…it is not actually about motherhood. Mothers hold the secrets to the universe and yet it is not about motherhood. The real connection to becoming and living out your true soul’s desire (spiritual journey) has nothing to do with being a mother. Motherhood is often the door that women walk through that causes them to see their power. Seeing their power is the first step in coming home to themselves and often seeing their power can be so overwhelming that they get stuck in the motherhood loop.

Continuing on the quest of the connection between motherhood and spirituality, another friend presented me with some channeled novels by Gates McKibbin. (You can purchase them here, I highly recommend) In these novels, you follow the evolution of a love story across lifetimes. The woman, who in this case is a representation of the divine feminine, never bears any children, and this fact by book three stuck out to me. How is it that this woman representing divine feminine doesn’t bear any children by the third book!

My thoughts spun around my head, isn’t the goal of being a woman to bear children? Don’t we tell women they lack something without children? Society does this dance where on the one hand you MUST bear children because you can and on the other how dare you bring more children into this world when there are so many problems. The constant conflict that is tossed around on the interwebs, in private circles, in tv shows, in movies, and in schooling is confusing and draining. So, I thought, she must certainly have a child in book four. Spoiler alert: She never bears children herself.

Then it hit me, one of those full body moments, the answer to my quest: If the lead in this book about divine feminine had a child she brought forth herself then it would be too easy to add to the confusion that women are here only to be a mother. It isn’t about motherhood. What is it you ask? The meaning of your life as a female on this planet.

Motherhood is a path, a beautiful, chaotic, spiritual, sky-rocketing growth path. Motherhood is not the only path and it is not the end goal of the path. Motherhood is the door to your magic and power. It is a moment when you can tangibly hold how creative you are as a being. It is a marker in life where you see that with very little effort (effort is the key word here) YOU can create a whole new being. You have the power to create worlds.

Motherhood is the door. The destination is becoming so yourself that you cultivate wild beauty around you. The destination is that you are free from the limitations you once held about your being.

If you ask me where life will take me my answer has always been the same.

When I was young I said one day I will live in “in Boston” and help people.

Or there was the time I told my mother that I wanted to be Dr. Quinn Medicine woman.

Or in high school when I said I would be 80 sitting in a room full of books, some that I wrote, and talking to people.

And then while in Australia when I told a random man I would be a business owner who helped women and he laughed and said “Dear you are much too soft for that”.

And yet here I am. Focusing on wisdom, neuroscience, innate knowledge to help others remember the parts of themself they have forgotten. It is an act of love.

It’s above love for humans finding their way back to their souls.

It’s about mothers brave enough to face the changes, the cracks, the spaciousness that occurred through birth and the years of motherhood.

It’s about relationships. Connecting to one another and reminding others that “No man is your enemy, no man is your friend, every man is your teacher”- Florence Scovel Shinn. It is about learning to love yourself so that you can love others.

Mothers are the start of love (yes, even broken messy love).

Mothers remind us of where we came from and where we can go.

Mothers and motherhood is misunderstood. Motherhood is not a problem AND it does not always (err really ever) fit into this “fast paced, productivity driven, outcomes are the best” world.

Motherhood (start, middle and yes even with adult children) is marked by a slower pace of life. It is the tug of holding on and letting go. Teaching risk while remaining a soft place to land. Oh, and learning to hold space for you, as the mother.

You do not enter motherhood and thrive. No - you stumble, you grow, you shine light on the things for years you were able to avoid and then small win after small win, honest cry after honest cry, surrender by surrender… you start to thrive.

We can land back here though - in love - always.

We need to allow ourselves to seek support, even for a moment, so that we can land back in love. We need to be reminded that from 0-3 our brain matter REALLY DID change and from 0-9 months our body is regulating our child's body. Then as the child grows the needs do not dissipate- it just gets different.

When we can sit in the moment of the gravity of this work, I believe we can start to feel the joy. It is and always will be both/and and yes/yes when experiencing life.

Try this for the next four days: Check in with yourself about three times a day and write down your emotions. Remember that emotions (the body’s response to the initial emotion) only lasts 90 seconds after that it is the thoughts you think that keep it (your emotion) alive. Go back on the fifth day and observe how your emotions vary. Use this tool when you are feeling stuck as a reminder that - even though our brains are hardwired to focus on the negative as a way to ensure wooly mammoths stay away from our kin - THERE are also other emotions, too.

And hey…if you do this and there are straight up NO other emotions than ones that feel crappy…reach out to a friend, a therapist, a hotline for some help because YOU deserve to feel all your emotions.

Do you ever just stop? Can you ever just stop?

Most moms I know answer no to both these questions. No they never stop and they can not stop.

Stopping is a learned behavior. Stopping and resting. Stopping and breathing. Stopping and just not doing the next thing you were about to do is LEARNED.

People who don’t know me well say things like “Mary - you are always so busy”. I often look at them confused. I stopped being busy years ago. Seriously. I am not busy. I am actually rather intentional (now those who do know me are laughing because I am OVER THE TOP intentional).

Busy is not some badge of honor to wear and get kudos. Though if you partake in busy the world will shower you in kudos. You will hear things like “how does she do it all?” or “I can’t believe she has so much energy” all the while knowing that you are running on borrowed bites of food and no sleep.

Busy comes at a cost. Busy means missing the finer things in life. Bush means missing the final leaves falling from the trees. The crunch of frost first thing in the morning. Busy means missing how much your friend misses you because she is holding down her own fort at home. Busy means not being fully present at home or with your baby.

Intention though breeds gratitude. Gratitude opens the doors to a less busy life. Through intention and gratitude you can start to practice stopping.

At first you stop for a moment to catch your breath three times a day. You remind yourself that breathing intentionally is the first connection back to you- you control your breath.

Then you start to look around you and name 5 things you are grateful for that day. Do this every day.

After a while you’ll want more of what brings you gratitude and when you start to get busy- you’ll start to see this moments as moments you lost your connection to yourself. Once again you return to the breath and find something you are grateful for to focus on. Just repeat this forever and you’ll be fine!

I want to say that I know postpartum depression and anxiety can create a disconnect from gratitude. So can things like PTSD and increased stress… if this is you know that therapy, somatic work, breath work and other trauma based treatments focused on nervous system regulation can help.