It's easy to get distracted by everyone else's opinions and ideas about how you should live your life, but you're the only one who knows what's best for you. Click here for the full article on Tiny Buddha.

Life pulls you in different directions. The spoken and unspoken rules of our society can quickly create many layers around our self-concept, and it can be easy to lose our sense of who we really are. ​Click here to read the full article on Having Time.

Many times I have felt a twinge of failure in this journey we are on together, now is another of those times.
Ideally I would love you to be able to learn what you want, when you want and in the way you want. In truth, you will anyway as it is only experience that teaches. But I’d like to have given you a freedom of scope beyond that which you have.

I know you would not choose to go to school if you had the option. I know one of the options open to us is homeschooling. But then, instead of teaching you to be who you are, I would be sacrificing who I am – and that is not the lesson I intend.

​Like all parents I would like to give you the perfect childhood. But what does that even mean?

Each parent, I think, has some driving force that influences the way they parent. For me it’s about allowing you to be who you are. For others it is about other things, like raising independent children. We are all different.

Allowing you the freedom to unfold as you want to, yet figuring out what that means in a society with many others who feel they have a right to impose their opinion – or worse, control – upon you, is an ongoing process.

I often say that if we lived cut off from society, you would be able to unfold unhindered. Consequences would naturally arise and you would learn and grow. We, however, live in a society of imposed consequences that remove your thinking from the true nature of things.

Like the time I talked to your daycare about the meals they made that you did not want. If we refuse food, it has a natural consequence – hunger. But the daycare chose to impose further consequences designed to make you comply. If you did not eat your meal, they re-presented it at afternoon tea and prohibited you from eating the cakes the others ate.

In this same way, we live in a society that creates parents as upholders of the millions of rules set by others. It creates more reliance on the parenting relationship than you would otherwise have naturally.

The government says you have to attend school between the ages of six and sixteen. The other option is to apply for an exemption and to home school. I have said you can do this when the time comes for college. At that point you will be able to drive your own curriculum and self-learn in a way that will satisfy our government.

In the meantime, you have to go to school. We have chosen the one that is most closely aligned to our values from the options available, but still, it is a square peg in a round hole.

This leaves a hole in my heart, especially when this pathway – that seemed to offer much – does not entirely deliver what I was expecting.

This is life sometimes; we take two steps forwards and one step backward. But what I have learned about holes and backward steps is that I must welcome them.

There is nothing in my past that has not turned out well in the longer run, for the best even.

I think I cannot give you the things I’d like to, but in truth I trust you are being given all that you need.

My own pathway was not one of having freedom to unfold. It was very decidedly of an era that ensured I walked the narrow pathway it prescribed, ‘or else’.

I ate the food I was given. I went to the school I was told to. I learned what I was told to. I treated people the way I was told to… the list is endless.  Yet still, I found the way back to me.

Society has changed a lot since I was young; more people have more freedom by comparison.

The biggest change though, I believe, is in the numbers who are becoming increasingly aware of the opportunities for an evolution of our society today.

Imagine health care that pays attention to the whole being, education that caters for individual expression and growth, governments operating with transparency and open communication or science that embraces the metaphysical.  The list and the opportunities are endless.

Most exciting of all, you are the generation born into a society becoming aware of its opportunities and failings. This puts you in the creative driving seat when it comes to solutions.

So life is not perfect my little ones, I don’t think we ever intended it to be or this journey would be fairly dull by comparison.

I, for my part, will always do my best to do whatever I feel is right in each moment; for that is all I can do, all any of us can do.

I love you always; keep following your joy.

If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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My story as a woman begins so long ago I have no conscious memory of it; it is the story that all women descend from, and echoes down the generations. The story starts in my grandmother’s womb, as my mother was conceived and the egg that would one day become me was formed within her…

“Let’s dive into this together and see if we can figure it out” I said to two of my girl friends.

For over three years now I’ve been regularly experiencing all sorts of cyclical symptoms, in fact it’s fair to say, it’s not been a good experience right from the first menstrual cycle I had over three decades ago. But I want to try and create a shift in my thinking and feelings about it and have a good experience with this aspect of my womanhood before these cycles cease altogether.

And I did indeed manage to achieve a new perspective, in our few hours that we took time out of our busy lives to explore this often taboo topic. The nature in which it is dealt with in our society, often in secretive discussions (from which men are largely excluded), has been insidious in its effects. Effects I want to stop at me rather than pass on to my daughters, or at least take the momentum out of them.

Over the years, after hearing many people’s stories and learning much from anthropological accounts of the female journey through womanhood, I have come to the conclusion it is an aspect of us that is intended to be held in reverence and to be embraced, rather than held in resistance and distaste. It is not an aspect of us that it intended to induce pain, or shame.

One of my friends led the discussion, moving me backwards and forwards and remaining focused on taking the powerful insights and reflecting them back to elicit further insights, it was quite a journey and she was very skilled at it. It’s a story I believe many will relate to and can have powerful healing effects for future generations.

The emotions we feel are carried in each of the cells within our body, positive emotions fuel our wellbeing and negative emotions create dis-ease and disruption to our biological makeup if not dealt with in a healthy way. Our tendency to suppress our emotions is learned early in childhood and, therefore, we are a veritable hotch-potch of everything from our ancestral make up to our own life experiences.

My great grandmother had, by all accounts, been a force to be reckoned with. She was a woman of the Victorian era, a teacher with a strong sense of morality. My mum once told me that she and my aunt used to go to her grandmother’s house every day after school (my gran – by then – was a single mother and worked) and they thought everyone’s grandmother taught extra lessons. But of her biology and feelings I know nothing.

My maternal grandmother was, by contrast, an unassuming woman. She was born at the start of the twentieth century and had just one older brother, of whom she was very fond. While I was well acquainted with my gran, she lived to enjoy her centennial celebration and many great grandchildren, she spoke very little of her own life and her feelings towards it.

Yet there are some defining moments of her life that I have come to know, mainly through my mum. I know that despite my gran’s apparent passive nature in contrast to her mother’s assertive one, it is likely there was a strong determination that lay beneath. Struck by illness and a long convalescence in her school years, she managed to persuade her parents towards the school she really wanted to attend all along.

My gran married young, the inference was that this was an act of rebellion, and had three sons to a man who would eventually walk out one day to get a loaf of bread and never return. One of my uncles saw him once in the years afterwards, at a football match, when he got given a coin. Needless to say, a divorce was had.

Her second marriage was one of deceit as well, her husband pretending to be many years younger than he was. They were married just before the end of the Second World War and had two girls together; he died when my mum was only seven.

This was, apparently, a blessing as my mum was not as passive as her mother. Mum can recall sitting on the floor drawing a picture and hearing a loud crack behind her as my gran went from one side of her peripheral vision to the other in an instant.

My grandfather was an aggressive alcoholic, and lung cancer was squeezing the very life from his body; gran had just entered her fifties when he died. It was the context though in which my mum had been conceived and in which the first physical traces of me – the egg from which I was later formed – were created.

However, this was not my gran’s last insult. A few years later when her parents died and – despite being a widow with two young children to look after (by then her boys, my uncles (who were much older), had begun to make their own way in the world), it was gran’s older brother (who was married with no children) who inherited the estate.

This was life for women back then, there were social customs and laws that limited their choices. Much has changed but, as my friend pointed out, it is only in recent years that domestic violence has become socially unacceptable, she recalls the campaigns of the 1980’s to raise the profile of this issue.

Life for women has changed enormously in my own lifetime, but not as much as it changed for my gran in her lifetime. To have been born into a highly restrictive era for women and yet have lived the last fifty years of her life quietly, and so entirely on her own terms, watching future generations being born into an ever-evolving society must have been quite something.

And yet still we bleed metaphorically and physically in ways that are quite foreign to that of our design. I recall my mum being whisked into hospital for blood transfusions and finally a hysterectomy as she literally bled out in her late forties. This seems to be a common crescendo to the reproductive years for many women, accompanied by years of mood swings, hot flashes and many other debilitating symptoms.

For my own part, I recall the introduction to my reproductive years vividly. Being a competitive swimmer, and training twice daily in the pool, it was not an option to ‘sit out’ for a week each month. I found that in order to use suitable sanitary products required a surgical removal of my hymen. Being admitted to hospital for an operation ‘down there’ at age twelve was embarrassing to say the least.

Then there were the cyclical physical symptoms, the dull aching feeling in my lower back that signaled the beginnings of some pretty acute and incapacitating cramping if there were no Askit powders to hand. I remember mum introducing me to Askit (a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that tasted fowl as it had to be mixed in water and drank), her drug of choice for the same symptoms.

In later years I used Mefenamic Acid for the same reason, as it had the good grace to be encapsulated and was easier to swallow. But the pain was severe even in my thirties, before I had given birth. I can remember one night, around midnight, crawling around the floor in our lounge just trying to ease the pain. Then of course I was up and out for work the next morning.

I used to think I am someone who is sensitive to pain, but a midwife set me straight on that when I delivered my second child. In deliberating whether to give me a local anesthetic before ‘sewing me up’ she told her assistant “no, go ahead, this one has a high threshold for pain.” Mind you, by then I’d had a lot of practice.

Menstruation was also the beginning of migraines. Walking to school one morning, I rounded the corner past some neighbours houses and noticed I had little lights dancing across my field of vision. By the time I’d gotten to school and started the first lesson of the day (it was home economics and we were making an apple pie), I hadn’t got past peeling the apples before I felt unable to keep my eyes open. The pain in my head was one-sided and quite excruciating and I felt totally nauseous.

Someone at the school had to call my mum to come and pick me up. The pain had gotten so bad by the time she arrived that I was literally lying curled up on the floor of the school hallway and only vaguely remember dozens of kids running past as the school bell rang signaling playtime. I was lost in my own haze and have no idea how I walked home.

Then there is the issue of blood flow for women. I remember when I started working at my first ‘real’ job after university; I’d worked there on a secondment during my postgraduate diploma and was quite familiar with the staff in the Human Resources department. The organisation had just employed a new Training Manager and she was quite a character.

What I remember is her arrival one morning after her hour’s bus ride to work. She rushed straight to the loo and then afterwards, in the office with the door closed, she went on to explain to the little gaggle of us women who worked there that she had really heavy clotting and had to go home again.

I was quite taken aback that a woman could experience (as a matter of course) such hemorrhaging that there was no sanitary product that could allow her to go about her normal day. And, unlike the menopausal women I mentioned earlier, the Training Manager was not an older lady; she was actually quite young and only recently married.

A friend told me of her experience when she started her own reproductive years. Her cycles were irregular and painful and – as a young teen – someone advised her sit on the ground against a tree in the moonlight, next time she was menstruating, and let herself bleed into the earth. With nothing to lose she did just that for a couple of nights.

While she doesn’t know why that worked, within three months her cycles evened out and she has never had any issues since (she is now in her forties). Perhaps it has something to do with recalibrating with nature’s natural rhythms and flow.

If menstruation has had its issues, then pregnancy and birth took everything to a whole new level. My children are pregnancies five and six, each one before was a ‘blighted embryo’ – a condition I was told that was usually a one-off occurrence.

After having had surgery to remove the first empty sac, the second time around I decided that – rather than undergo another general anesthesia and surgery – I would take an alternate (debatably more natural) route to evacuating the empty sac. That time I was sat in a ward with several others all undergoing the same process, given a drug called Misoprostal and a metal tub to collect the ‘evacuations’ in and told it would just feel a bit like period cramps.

Pretty horrific is my succinct description of that process. Having already described the pain of a normal cycle, you might imagine that pain as nothing compared to the pain kick-started by Misoprostal. There was no sedate lying in bed, I ended up locking myself in the ward toilet and – on all fours – stayed there in my own vortex of pain, contraction after contraction, until the sac was passed.

Suffice to say, by blighted embryo’s three and four, I opted again for unconscious surgical removal of the empty sac. But these failed pregnancies were not, of course, just about process of physical recovery. While I was philosophical, each pregnancy had carried its own hopes and dreams; most had a name and a bond created within.

After finally managing to successfully conceive in my late thirties (a whole other story on its own), throughout the early stages of pregnancy I had weekly scans. If every emotion we feel is felt in our very cells, you can imagine the stress on that young embryo as I contended with the constant stress of maintaining the pregnancy. It is no surprise my first child displays quite an anxious personality at times.

My first experience of labour took physical pain and exhaustion to yet another new level. After a day of early labour pains and then over twenty two hours of labouring, with not much progress, I finally looked at the midwife and told her I wanted an epidural.

She called for an ambulance to take me from the maternity centre to the hospital, as that is where epidurals were done. Unfortunately it was a Saturday evening and the ambulances were busy so, in the end, it took three hours before I was transferred to the ambulance for the fifteen minute journey.

Having made the decision to seek pain relief, as time ticked on I got more and more frantic. By the time I was loaded into the ambulance, I screamed murder every time we had to cross over a speed bump in the road. I remember finally arriving in a theatre to await the anesthetist, and I could hear the midwife talking to him on the phone obviously debating the need for urgent attention as he was being called to another operation.

I cannot remember the words I yelled, but they obviously sealed the deal as the anesthetist promptly arrived and the epidural was at last dispensed. My daughter was born twelve hours later by ventouse. It was a long night.

My second pregnancy was a bit more relaxed and, for the birth, the midwife had agreed to admit me to the hospital straight away given the horrific ordeal of the first birth. I had decided to try and deliver naturally, but did not want to rely upon an ambulance if I wanted pain relief.

As it turned out the second labour progressed much more quickly than the first and, by the time the midwife arrived, she felt the hospital was too far to travel. She did something for me then that helped me enormously, she grabbed my hips and showed me how to move with the pain rather than resist it.

Almost four hours later, feeling like I had finally mastered the art of labour, I heard the midwife comment to her assistant that they would need to get me to the hospital as the baby was going to rip me open (she had her hand above her head superman-style). This was all it took for my body to respond. With a final involuntary convulsive push she was out, and I needed sewn back together.

That was when the comment was made about my tolerance to pain. As I showered afterward, blood draining everywhere, I remember hearing someone delivering a baby in the next room. It was quite a shock to hear how harrowing it sounded from the outside. No doubt I’d made similar sounds, but from the inside I had withdrawn into a quite space.

I just remember thinking “I never have to do this again.”

And I contrast this with friends and other women who have had amazing experiences that – in comparison – were pain free. They have described their menstrual cycles and labours as ‘mild discomfort’. We are all different.

Sharing these experiences with my friends created a new perspective. There has clearly been trauma, mine from the moment I was an egg in my mother’s womb, and through my own life experiences since birth, and it has been played through this journey of womanhood.

As I talked about this journey, and about my other journey, the journey to a more authentic me, my friend pulled out some words I had used as I had shared: 

• the pain of loss (including my twin brothers who were born prematurely in the pregnancy before me and subsequently died), and the physical pain endured (not just by me, but the generations before);
• the shame felt in having my hymen removed, in unsuccessful pregnancies, and – ancestrally – in domestic violence and in abandonment;
• the reclamation of me, Shona Keachie; the process of evolving in my beliefs about me and the world;
• the feeling of safety to be able to talk about these things today;
• Trust in the way life works, in the bigger picture;
• The process of mastering pain;
• The process of shedding old wounds, old pains, in the journey to me;
• The desire to embrace my womb as a seat of feminine power.

As I look back now, I am in awe of each of the women in my lineage for all that they endured. I now live in an age and a society where being a woman need no longer be about sufferance and for that I am truly grateful.

Just prior to catching up with my girl friends I had watched the final episode of one of my favourite TV dramas, Nashville. At the end, Callie Khouri (the creator) had said “that’s a wrap”. That is how I felt about the chain of pain that has been created through my womanhood, it ends here. Each player has played our part, the show is over.

One of the most miraculous gifts we have been given is the power to create another life. The mechanics of all for women have been suppressed for so long, it was time to take a look in the darkness and see what lurked there.

And as always happens, when we shine a light in the dark, everything brightens. I feel the possibility for an entirely different future for my daughters, and for the daughters out there that are still playing their part in this chain of pain in societies and families where pain and suppression still occur.

After all the years hearing about feminism, embracing womanhood means something entirely different to me today. Rather than something in opposition to the masculine, or trying to compete with it.  embracing womanhood is about embracing reverence and joy, the very art of creation.

​If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In the evenings, when I used to work in the corporate world, I’d get done with putting the kids to sleep and then responding to emails and it would be 10pm; time for bed. It would also be the point at which my partner would switch off the TV he had been watching and silence would surround me like a comfortable blanket at last.

Then there would be this feeling of having just missed something and a subtle, but persistent, energetic tug at my sleeve that was always present in that moment. I later learned (when some contemplation time opened up for me) that was my inner voice waiting to be heard; a voice which I now regularly focus in on through my writing.

This week I have been reminded of that time. It’s the school holidays here and I’ve had barely a moment to myself. This has coincided with the clocks moving forward, so getting things done in the evenings after the kids are in bed has been challenging. There has been a lot to do, with end of month reconciliation and returns for my partner’s business, as well as all the usual rounds of invoicing, quotes and endless housework and other chores.

While I’ve made it a priority to leave my partner in charge for fifteen minutes each evening while I lock myself in the spare room and meditate, I will admit I’ve been starting to get resentful about some of the tasks on my plate.

The word ‘resentful’ reminded me about last week’s blog Interdependence as Our Healthy State when I wrote:

Interdependence is the mutual giving and receiving of things that are enjoyed and valued. If you find yourself feeling resentful in anything you are regularly doing for someone else, and vice versa, then you are not in an interdependent relationship with them, you are in a co-dependent relationship. Giving something of yourself when you don’t want to, especially if it receives no appreciation, is the road to ruin.

This is because there is no love given or felt when it is done in resentment. So I decided to take a look at the many hats I wear in each day for more insight on those I am giving freely, versus those I can resent (at least at times). It was a worthwhile exercise, and one I’d recommend, listing everything I do and how I feel about each. It gave me a deeper understanding of what affects me negatively and positively.

It was no surprise that My Work - which is about growth and expansion into higher consciousness and sharing those insights with others - is what I truly love; it is what I literally live for. This and looking after my kids, my wellbeing and my relationships are the only things on the list I enjoy or care about. Everything else feels like I’m just churning the mill to be here and be part of society.

What came to light are the little areas that act as tipping points into wholly resenting tasks – one in particular is picking up after others, who are perfectly able to pick up after themselves, just so I can live in a reasonably clean and clutter-free space.

This gave me much needed perspective as, often when I’m feeling overwhelmed, it creates a black cloud over all the tasks I’m doing and the resentment becomes all-consuming.

While this was a practical and useful insight to gain, what had been particularly irking me this week, is the awareness that I have two others topics that are very activated for me right now and I am desperate to dive into and write more about them.

That little energetic tug on my sleeve I get when there is a thread that needs unpicked, and the butterflies in my tummy knowing there are more ‘ah ha’ moments to be had, keeps getting the ‘pause’ button pressed. I had begun to worry about how ‘cut-off I was from my own inner voice and broader perspective.

Yet I need not have worried. A friend had passed along a short guided meditation, not something I generally use. Most often I simply meditate in silence and focus on my breathing. However, this week my thoughts have been a bit too pervasive, so I thought I’d give the guided meditation a try.

It was a beautiful experience. At 10 o’clock at night, as exhausted as I was, I sat down in surrender and pressed play. It was silent and still and yet I imagined myself as this gigantic being standing amid the cosmos just watching as whole universes expanded and a light-show of amazing proportions played for my pleasure.

There were moments when I took my attention from the expanse of the cosmos and just zoomed in on the details: I saw a single daffodil dancing in the sunshine, and other beautiful but indescribable things on other planets.

In just a few minutes I had entered a state of serenity, wonder and peace. It was a great reminder that our authentic selves, the love within and the broader perspective are always present; it’s just a case of switching focus.

I realised time was not a problem; the fact I’ve had to press pause on some inspiration I want to unpick is okay. Just understanding what that little energetic tug on my sleeve is nowadays is a miracle in itself. And better, I have two days next week when both kids will be otherwise occupied and I can dive into these delicious topics that I want to explore. Nothing is lost and, inevitably, more depth will be found.

It can be too easy to lose ourselves in the everyday churn of life. But if you learn how to focus, you will be able to find yourself amid the mayhem and make time for the things that are truly important to you.

​If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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