I’m back to podcasting! I know it’s been about 8 months since my last episode and I have missed you all. I have just been navigating the reality of being ia new mother, having more limited time now, amidst navigating the identity shifts and transformations of becoming a mother.
I’m so excited to share my conversation with Jane, a true voice and channel for the heart of the Holy One. You may remember Jane from earlier episodes: episode 118 - Navigating Change and the Power of Listening, and episode 128 where I shared the story of my daughter’s birth.
Jane and I have also had these parallel paths, like the passing of birds in the sky, she moved to kauai the month I was getting ready to leave, being pregnant and desiring to be closer to family. And now, Jane being halfway through her pregnancy is deciding the same.
In this episode we discussed:
Trusting our intuition
Being open to the twists and turns and mystery of life
Gender reveals and navigating surprise and difficult emotions
Jane’s unsuccessful journey with IVF in a previous marriage and the journey of natural conception and pregnancy years later
Jane’s decision to leave Kauai
Our stories of miscarriage from this past year
Vedic astrology insights and life transitions
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Jane Mayer is a medicine woman, creative, doula, and guide to the unseen realms, who delights in supporting humans and Earth in coming fully alive. Alongside supporting private clients, she writes, records and performs music, and guides a school for creativity and awakening.
A keeper of song and a lover of mythos, her practice is borne of the weaving of indigenous medicine from Peru, Hawaii and Ireland, the Christian mysticism of her home in the deep South, and a depth of knowledge in the nervous system, subtle body, womb healing, and the somatic experience of awakening.
She holds deep trust in the wild intelligence of nature to guide all of Creation, and orients others to their deeper nature and innate gifts with sound, myth, dreams, plant, energy medicine and somatic integration.
She is devoted to the heart of all things, sacred union, and the liberation of all beings. To learn more, visit iamjanemayer.com.
This Fall I participated in a weekly new parent-baby group in Sebastopol, CA with Kerry Ingram. I met Kerry years ago when she found one of my self-care guide downloads and invited me to be a wise woman to visit her mom and baby groups. I remember thinking I would love to join something like that to meet other mothers and babies if I ever had a child one day… and about six years later it happened!
Kerry has been supporting new mothers, babies and families for the past decade in CA and now is sharing her curriculum to create a ripple effect of sharing more of these nourishing postpartum groups around the world.
Care for the next generation really does start with the mother, and the more we can surround families with support in early postpartum the easier it will be to interrupt harmful narratives and create networks of love, care and support when we need it most.
In this episode we discussed:
Kerry’s experience postpartum: the surprises, challenges and ways she found the support she needed
How community support impacts early parenting and is culture-making by creating space to see and interrupt harmful narratives
How to be a village tender and step into leadership for new parents in your community
The “Early Parenting Villains” and how these systems, for example, ‘consumerism’ ‘diet culture’ or ‘patriarchy’ come up so often in new motherhood, how to identify them and ways to shift our relationship with them
Self-care in postpartum, asking for help and building community
Links in this episode:
Kerry’s Course: Village Tenders Postpartum Community Care Course
Stay in Touch with Kerry:
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Kerry Ingram is the founder of Community Supported Postpartum whose mission is to build ecosystems of care one community at a time. She contributes to this vision by teaching folks all over the world how to step into the role of Village Tender by creating local parent and baby groups that get parents out of isolation and into a web of support and care.
Kerry is a parent (both biological and foster), an early childhood educator (20 years), a postpartum doula, with additional education in women and gender studies (SUNY Oswego), and maternal mental health care (PSI). She has been facilitating local parent and baby groups for over 10 years and teaches others around the world to step into leadership with her Village Tenders Postpartum Community Care course, curriculum and business framework.
It’s an honor to have Becca Piastrelli back on Rising Women Leaders. It’s been a few years (and a lot of transformation) since our last conversation (episode 10!). We’ve both transitioned from maiden to mother, and our lives and businesses have transformed along with us. In this conversation we share the real, the raw, and the beautiful of being initiated into mothers: Becca shares of her journey of the last 2.5 years after birthing her daughter, her journey with delayed postpartum depression (and rage) at 18 months, how she has done her best to recreate the village we all long for, what it looks like to untangle from patriarchy and letting go the need to always do more, and how we can honor and ritualize the powerful rite of passage of shifting from maiden to mother.
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Becca Piastrelli is the author of Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community & the Self and is the host of the Belonging podcast. She teaches and speaks on the nature of belonging and runs retreats to help women reconnect with their rooted sense of self. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area (soon to be Hudson Valley, NY) with her husband, child, two cats, and five chickens, where she gardens, cooks, mothers, and gathers with the ebb and flow of the seasons.