 Greetings. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for all being here. My name is Nahanda Chuscott, and you are here for breaking the cycle, healing the mother wound. I just want to give a big thank you to the SOAS Virtual Festival of Ideas for inviting me today to speak on this topic. It's one very close to my heart. And I'll be breaking down what the mother wound is, and making sure that all of our phones are off. And I just wanted to give a bit of context to how this talk was originally envisioned. So I just want to know that you can all hear me and see me. Can you all just put a little yeah in the chat box just to make sure I'm good to begin? Because I can't see any of you. Okay. Okay. Okay. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Thank you. That's amazing, guys. Okay. So yeah, I first envisaged this talk being discussed in person in a women's circle where we could all kind of be much more intimate with each other, where we could share, you know, our own personal stories, and I could actually host a healing space. Obviously, oops, pandemic, we find ourselves here. And I'm really grateful that SOAS decided to continue this in the virtual sense, but it has shifted somewhat the way that I've chosen to present the information. So if you saw the write-up which describes having a guided meditation and journaling session, this has actually been condensed from two hours down to one hour. So it's actually going to be more of an informal presentation, and then there will be 15 minutes at the end where you can interact and give me your questions and speak about anything that's come up for you. I also have a section in the middle where we have an opportunity to just kind of integrate everything that's been coming up, right? So I just hope that you're able to give this your full attention for the next 45 minutes to the hour. You're able to kind of tune in, close off distractions, and really just open up to receiving this work that I've been working on. So without further ado, I'll give you a deeper introduction to myself. So for those who don't know me, I know some of my people are on here, so hello. But for those who don't know me, like I said, my name is Nahanda Truscott-Reed. I am a mother of two. I'm a holistic wellness coach, and I'm the founder of The Soul Mama Journey. So The Soul Mama Journey is what I designed as a response to my own motherhood transition and just realizing that there was a vast gap for the type of healing and for the type of conversation that I felt needed to be ushered in for the transition of motherhood, right? So I do this through one-to-one coaching, I do this through group work in circles, pre-pandemic, and I also write and speak around all of the topics that are integrated and come up for me around conscious motherhood and healing and wellness. I also host The Soul Mama podcast, some of you may have heard, and that's had its first season, which ran really well. So you'll actually get to hear an excerpt from one of those conversations here today. So to begin, for those of you who are on this session, you may have heard about the term the mother wound, but what actually are we talking about? It's always helpful to begin with a definition, and I'm using one here from Bethany Webster. So she is a self-proclaimed leader on what the mother wound is, and she uses this description, which I think is helpful. So she says, it's the pain that's rooted in the relationship with our mothers that is passed down through generations and has a profound effect on our lives. And left unresolved, we passed on unhealed mother wounds, which consist of toxic and oppressive beliefs, ideals, perceptions, and choices. I thought it was also helpful to bring in a kind of counter definition. So this is by a white Australian doctor called Dr. Oscar Sparilac, and he writes interestingly about women's wellness and specifically around postpartum wellness. This is what he uses the mother wound to describe the burden of pain and grief that grow in women as she tries to explore her power and potential in a society that doesn't make room for her. It forces her to internalize the dysfunctional coping mechanisms learned by previous generations of women. I think both of those are alluding to similar things, but what I'm hoping to do here is to bring in further complication to that, bring in a little bit more nuance to that, and bringing more of my lived experience as a Caribbean woman of mixed heritage living in Britain. And what I see play out in real time with the people that I observe, the people that I work with, and the people that I support. So, I think it's helpful to break down the ways and I'm just keeping an eye on the chat so feel free to post any questions that come up during the chat into the Q&A box. And then at the end, I'll kind of go through all of them so if something comes up for you, write it down and then we'll come back to it at the end right. So I think it's useful to begin with the four levels of mother wound. So the mother wound happens on the micro level, it happens on the macro level. And I think this can be broken down in four helpful ways. So we start with the personal mother wound. Right. So this describes a severed or a toxic bond that has been broken down for whatever reason, with our own mothers. It usually happens through pregnancy in early infancy and through childhood, which by the time that we're an adult, we've unconsciously unconsciously started to limit or sabotage ourselves, our relationships, or start to see that these patterns are playing out in harmful ways in our lives. Right. So that's a personal, that's a first. The second is the societal level. So this is the generational collective pain of women's disempowerment, who have been oppressed, and the dysfunctional coping mechanisms which Dr. Siralic mentioned, that women employ to be able to process that pain. Right. So it's all of the ways that we're being held down. How that begins to show up in the body, how that begins to show up in our actions and our choices and our behaviors, and that kind of collective wounding is the societal level. Then there is the spiritual. And I think this is really important and it usually gets left out of the conversation when we're speaking about the mother wound, strictly as a psychological concept. Right. So the spiritual mother wound is the chronic feeling of abandonment. It's that sense of being spiritually orphaned, not being tethered to something, not being grounded and not feeling a sense of belonging in something or to something. And that leads us to feel disconnected from our bodies from each other and from life itself. And then the fourth one is the global mother wound. And so this quite literally is the disconnection from Mother Earth, from Mother Nature, from the planets which is our first mother, our actual home. Right. And we can see that play out in myriad of ways in the ways that, you know, humanity is going so I don't even need to go into the depths of that. But it's a it's a denial and a severing from the feminine aspects of creation and the feminine aspects of true nature. So the thing that I find runs through all of these, the personal, the societal, the spiritual and the global is this deep sense of separation. It's a feeling of not being able to feel ourselves adequately connected to or belonging in a way that is healthy, that is sustaining, and that is nourishing. So when we ask the question, where does the mother wound begin, where does the mother wound actually come from, we cannot have that conversation without bringing in patriarchy. So if you who have been in this space in this work, you will know that it's something that comes up time and time again because it has so many, so many effects right. So if we think about patriarchy, I like to talk about it as the dishonoring and suppression of women's power are innate power and the limits and systemic oppression that happens as a result. It dismisses women's roles. It dismisses women's innate essence, and it gets protected through the mistreatment and the messaging that follows to maintain this lie that women are inferior right. In the denial of women's rights, we are then subjected to denial over our bodies, over our choices, over our lives, and this sets up a climate of pain and struggle that women end up internalizing. And it gets experienced and displayed in different ways through different times by different women. So we're going to talk about how that plays out. I also feel that religion is a very important vehicle for how patriarchy gets translated down to people. And if we look at just the Abrahamic religions, we can see that the feminine essence has not only been removed, but it's actually been vilified, right. So women have been removed from their rightful place as, you know, top and center in essential, essentiality. So if we speak about Christianity, for example, Eve, we know is depicted as the temptress, as the seducer, as the one who is to blame for original sin. And as a punishment, childbirth and the pain of childbirth is her charge, right. I mean, that sets us up to really have a lot of problems in the way that we approach motherhood, in the ways that we embody our roles as women. And you can start to see how this plays out. So even the fact that the female gospels have been removed, women's voices aren't in spirituality women's voices aren't in our religious beliefs, right. So if you look at indigenous beliefs and systems, they actually, instead of the Holy Trinity, which is obviously the father, the son and the Holy Ghost, they have a sacred circle where it's the Holy Mother, or the sacred mother, the sacred father, and the Holy Child, right. So there is this unity and balance and this harmony between masculine and feminine, and that family unit being upheld and elevated as something holy and sacred. But obviously the ways that we've translated it in the West with this, I believe, deliberate suppression of feminine essence means that we are continuing to pass down this spiritual mother wounding. So here which is from scouts cloud Lee, who's the author of a book called the circle is sacred. And she says the first mother, the mother creation is finding her way back into the Trinity, where she has been hidden and suppressed as the Holy Ghost since the time of colonization. And I think that's a really powerful quote to just illustrate how, how this unfolds. So I also have to bring in the systemic racism and colonization that has happened in this world, right. So the system of oppression that has created the hierarchy of humans and continues to systemically and violently dehumanized black and brown bodies across the globe has an undeniably wounding effect specifically on mothers of color. And this is where I think my talk differs to the conversations that I'm seeing happening in the mainstream around the mother wound. I don't see that these things are being taken into account and really analyzed and interrogated and understood with a level of compassion that they need to. So if we're going to take black motherhood and the black mother wound through the rest of this talk I'm going to be able to break down in more ways how that actually is created and sustained and passed down. So if we think about emancipation, where slavery was supposedly abolished, where having children is no longer in the interest of the slave master. That is when we see the shift from the push of productivity to an actual wanting to control reproductivity for black women. So racism continues to corrupt notions of reproductive liberty. And this has been written about extensively by Dorothy Green, who is an amazing writer who has written killing the black body. And she goes on to detail the ways that from slavery and emancipation onwards, there have been continued efforts to attack the black woman, the black reproductive rights of women. And I see this as a large part of the mother wounding, right. So I want to bring it slightly forward as a black British woman myself, I want to use that example in that lineage as a, as a way to kind of go deeper because I think we're quite used to the American story, but it's helpful to kind of bring it to our context. So if we think about the movement and displacement of a people who were literally stolen from their motherland moved to the Caribbean, or the Americas. They were severed from their mother tongue, right, so they weren't actually able to use the language and able to indulge in the cultural belonging that would have anchored them, right, they were severed from all of the things that made them African, right. So then enslavement begins to break that down even further through the abuse and the exploitation and the kind of forced reproduction that women and men were were subjected to. And then there was the gendered bonds between mothers and fathers between mothers and children. And then there was the false creation in the ideology of what was being spoken about as England being the mother country. And if you think about who runs England, you know, Queen Elizabeth being this white woman who is the queen who is the head. So this is like a false mother that's being offered, right. And then fast forward, when England began to call people from the colonies to come and to serve their mother country. There was this language which was again reignited around, you know, your mother country needs you, and this idea that there was a benevolence there. And so people traveled, you know, to England, and were not only met with hostility, but were rejected. So I'm tracing these things and I'm seeing that there's like these multiple levels of rejection and mother wounding. And so these ongoing oppressions and systemic efforts to break down the black family continue. We see that in the way that there is the prison to the school system to prison pipeline, right. We see this in the way that there is unequal access to health services. We see this in the way that there are health inequalities. All of these things to me are, you know, manifestations of this original mother wounding kind of playing out. So I'm going to play you a quote, which is from Danny McClain. She is the author of we live for the we the political power of black motherhood. And this is taken from a conversation that we both had on my podcast, the summer podcast and I think it's episode four. So let me know that you can hear this clearly I'm just going to play it. It's easier to blame people and of course it's it's most easy to blame black women right become kind of the face of like the single parent household. There's a historical piece there that we forget, which is that black families were systematically broken apart. Slavery depended on us not having intact family units. You know, children were sold away from parents loved ones were sold away from each other. So as a partner we could easily be sold away from you are killed, you know, humiliated dehumanized in front of you. So now this idea that you know a couple of hundred years later we're supposed to be able to like match this be like white middle class idea of the nuclear family that's insane. I think it's important to look at the ways in which black family has looked and survived over time and place what we look like today within that context so that we can take some pride in who we are, and not just let this dominant narrative tell us that we're broken and we're less than. Really, I heard somebody ask if I'm going to be sharing these notes afterwards. So there is going to be a recording of the webinar. That will be shared on so as YouTube channel and I'm happy to send links to all of my references, which I can organize as part of the show notes to that YouTube video. Make the decision not to just focus on slides for this so I hope it's actually landing a bit deeper because sometimes I find we get caught up in reading the words and I actually want us to begin to open to the feeling right. So, all of this is to say that there is inevitable repercussions on the way women survive and the way black women end up in habit ing, inheriting and body ing the mother wound and how that gets passed down. So I thought it would be helpful to actually begin to look at some of the manifested archetypes and these these you might recognize as stereotypes that I see play out. And we, I think recognized in the community, but have also been vilified and used as the source of blame for a lot of things. So the first one is the strong virtuous mother, right. So this is the woman who carries all of the heavy burdens and does it with a smile, you know who shows up for work who does what she needs to do for her family, who just takes and takes and takes. You see this as being born of the kind of Christian projection of hardship and struggle being a virtue. And within that black women are still othered, because every depiction of women in Christianity is still kind of based around the archetypal mother, Mary, who is depicted as this white pure woman, virginal at that. And so I feel like on a psyche level this really does damage to women who are embodying that that goal and playing that out. And what I see is that there is this surface kind of smile, but beneath that there is so much rage there is so much pain that that then gets transmuted in other ways through dis ease, you know that then manifests on in the body. So that's the first one is the strong virtuous mother. The second one, which is kind of an extension but still quite different is the super mom. And that is the mom who works two jobs who works nights who cooks who cleans who pays all of the bills who does everything that she needs to do to maintain a quality of life for herself for her family for her children, but she's never present. Like, she's unable to stretch herself thin enough to be present in a way that is meaningful and that creates that emotional security and bonding for her children, right. The third one is the over strict mother. So this is like the author, author, authoritarian, the disciplinary and the woman who is internalizing all of the fear and the suppression and the anxiety around protecting her children and making sure that there is safety and control of her young, but in doing that, it leads to over discipline. It leads to this kind of I, I will make sure that in my home you act a certain way, or that, you know that you're going to go out and represent me in this particular way that's going to keep you safe. But actually there is damage that's being done there in this over discipline and this over harshness. The third one is this trope of the single mother, right, the lonely, normally depicted as vulnerable, normally impacted also by poverty, and ends up being blamed as we heard through that quote by Danny McClain for much of society's ills. I want to speak about, you know, how the black single mother ends up bearing the brunt of a lot of the criminalization of youth of black youth. So this is something that gets used as shorthand quite often. And then the last one that I want us to focus on is the toxic mother. So this is the mother who ends up either being addicted to substances, food, alcohol, as a way to survive and to co. This also can end up transferring this toxicity to abuse to the child, whether it's mental, emotional, physical, or sexual, right. So to me, these each evolve in different variants as a stress response, they're actually a coping survival mechanism that women are living through to find their ways through an oppressive, violent society where their own connections with their mothers were likely severed, and that ends up being passed down. So it's not about victim consciousness, I just want to make a point about that it's not about woe is us because all of these things have happened. Neither is it about blaming women, either individually or collectively, and it's definitely not about judging women right. It's about understanding the context from which we've come and using that to really bring nuance to our understandings of our journeys as women today. So I think through doing this, it shows us that nothing actually happens in isolation, the mother wound doesn't start with one woman, right. It starts in all of these myriad of ways and it gets compounded through time through through all of these different actions and it shows up in these different ways. The reason why I feel like there is problematic ways that we end up speaking about the mother wound, even though we may not use that language in the black community is because we actually begin to take these on as cultural norms. These are the relative stereotypes of black motherhood, which have ended up being vilified and judged and blamed by white society and the conversations in government around, you know criminalization and the problems of society. We actually end up kind of taking that on and then normalizing it and and mistakenly embodying it as part of our culture as part of our norm. We think about black comedians, right, we think about the ways that we would laugh and joke about how strict our parents were, or what they used to be us with, or how that's depicted in film, or through music, or even an art. We see that these things get played out as kind of tropes of black culture. And I'm arguing here today that they're not right. So a recent example, and this came to my attention when I was preparing for this talk and I just think it's a perfect example. Lauren Hill and Rowan Marley had Sealer Marley, their daughter who's now 21. And she recently opened up online about her childhood being really traumatic. She described her mother's beating of her and her siblings as being like an extension of corporal punishment punishment for which she felt she was really traumatized by. And so that's actually up on YouTube if people are interested and want to watch it, but she calls it like some real slavery shit. And she just says, you know, I can't believe that they were in this headspace where this was the way that they disciplined me and my siblings. Lauren Hill now made a statement and she says, Sealer got the discipline that black children get because we are held to a different standard. The toxic venom I ingested for standing on principle and confronting systemic racism far before it was a thing to do. Of course that has seeped into my home. It has intended to. I was affected and my children were affected. And I think that really shows this way that the wound gets internalized by women and then gets played out in the ways that we go on to discipline and engage with our children. But the thing that I found really interesting was the comments. So they were myriad of comments. Obviously the internet is this place. But the things that I found interesting were the kind of common responses of, yeah, I got beaten worse than that I turned out fine. Right. Yeah, you should be you should have got that beating look at you you're an articulate successful woman that has come as a result of the ways that your mother raised you. Or do not add a laundry. How are you speaking about what happened in your home in a public space. And I think all of these responses, you know, really go to the heart of why certain things haven't been discussed. I haven't been addressed and haven't been healed in the black community. One of the comments that I found really interesting was like this generation Z is too soft, like everybody's begging trauma, but this isn't really trauma. And I was like, first of all, nobody gets to tell another person what trauma is or isn't. And second of all, I think this generation is actually more well versed with language and with support to be able to work through things that other generations had to just move through. Right. So we're the generation that have the opportunities that we are the ones who have the space to actually go deeper and to begin to heal this, both up the mother line and going forward if we choose to have children. And there's a quote here that I want to share which is from Stacy Patton. She's author of a book called spare the child why whooping will not save black America. And just kind of caveat she says, we need to stop embracing as a culture, the things that are actually generational lies. And her book is all about how we can stop, you know, beating and punishment to children in the black community with some actually scary statistics. So if you're interested, you may want to read that. So we've spoken a little bit about how this kind of plays out. And I want to speak specifically now to how the mother wound actually gets passed down. So if we think about the ways that a mother consciously or unconsciously is connecting with her child. Obviously, there is what gets passed down through genetics and DNA. But there is also the emotional connection that begins from within the womb, in my opinion. Right. So the fear, the anxiety, the stress, the insecurity, all of that that the mother is experiencing on a potentially day to day basis, the micro aggressions, all of that is felt in the womb by the fetus right. It's translated through infancy, through movement, through the ways that the mother moves her stuff but also through the ways that the mother moves the child through touch. Actually the quality of touch how the mother touches how often the mother touches the baby through attention and gaze, and what is being picked up by the baby to kind of mirror and reflect back to her that she is safe, and I'm using her obviously for both genders, and also through the tone and language, right. So if you just for a minute imagine that a woman is either less available because of the demands and realities that she finds herself in. Or because of those same demands and realities, she is then kind of carrying that into the ways that she mothers. All of this is impacting and severing the kind of grounded self that the baby and the mother should have in the ideal scenario. So, this is a quote from Antonella Sansone, and she says some mothers who have damaged relationships with their own mothers struggle to solve their own mother child conflicts, which can manifest through psychosomatic disturbance. As you can see touch movement and emotion is intimately related. The mother's concerns conflicts mental states affect the mother infant relationship on all levels, impinging on a baby's natural development and the development of a grounded body self. My argument in all of this is that we do not prepare support or nourish women enough before and during and throughout motherhood. And that for me is what led me to begin the work and the journey that I'm on in beginning cell mama journey is to actually answer that call and to create a space where we can begin to have these conversations and to actually heal. So, what I see in my actual practice, I see that the passage of motherhood acts as a trigger for these traumas, these traumas that are stored in the body that are present in the psyche that show up in the choices that we've made in the relationships that we find in. So it's not to say that the mother wound doesn't exist and it's only reactivated when we go through that transition, but that's what I see there's a kind of quickening where when women find out that they're pregnant if they haven't planned that pregnancy or even before when they're trying to conceive, there is a awareness that comes flooding to the present of actually where do I sit in my mother line, what am I carrying forward, am I going to be able to override some of the negative blueprints that have been passed down. You know, what what healing needs to be done, you know, and so I see this play out in a very real way in what women are experiencing. And so I believe that the ways that our wombs respond is one kind of clear indicator that we have taken on through generations, these wounds, right, so if you look at the womb health of black women and Queen Afua, who's the author of Sacred Women speaks about this amazingly in her book, which is a journey of womb wellness. And so she says the condition of women's wombs directly reflect the condition of women's minds, their spirits, their actions. The womb is a storehouse of all of our emotions. And I expand that just to include all of the things that are also happening in the environment to women. And, and that's why I started off in the way that I did. So that shows up in our fertility, right. Dr. Lori Johnson is a fertility specialist African American women. And she speaks about the fact that fertility issues have long been considered something that only impact white women. Serotypes around black female fertility portray us as hyper fertile, because it's important to understand that intersectionality, the connection between racial trauma is actually fertility trauma. I've seen this in the responses where when I speak to women about what I do, and this is even black women. And I say, you know, I'm supporting women through conception. People say things like black women don't need support to get pregnant, like black women need support to stop getting pregnant. And I'm like, this is not true. It's, it's, it's an ignorance on the behalf of the stereotype that we've kind of inherited and taken on in some certain aspects that we have this hyper fertility, and that leads to shame, and to a kind of inner conflict where women who are experiencing struggles with fertility don't feel like there are safe spaces that they can go to actually work through that and to seek support. Despite higher rates of vibrates, despite high rates of endometriosis preeclampsia PCOS, etc, a PCOS for those who don't know is polycystic ovary syndrome. All of these are reproductive health issues that are related to the womb, and I believe are the seat of the motherhood, right. We are still less likely to seek support from services to invest in IVF to be in a position to actually either pay for or access breastfeeding support maternal mental health support, etc. So this is part of the unpacking that we have to do unpacking of the shame unpacking of fear, you know the taboos the stigma, and to be actually creating a space where we can have this conversation. And this is to say that the cycle continues unless we take heed and we take a pause, and we actually face what's actually coming up, and then we take back our power and we reclaim that and we begin to own our healing. And so I think that's a really good opportunity just for a little introspective pause to see whether any of this has brought up anything for you on a personal level. So in the circle, this would be a space where we would actually begin to journal and to actually breathe into the body. And if you feel like you're comfortable and able to do that you are welcome to do so. And just by placing the hands on the room, taking a moment to close the eyes and actually breathing into where this information is landing, like what's coming up for you on the body level. So my memories for you is it bringing up for recognition for you. If there's anything you want to share in the comment box now you can. But you're really just having an opportunity to ask yourself, where might the mother wound be showing up for you in your family line in your habits in your relationships in your body. Checking the comment box. Okay. Are you all still with me. We're going to go into healing. I'm just looking at time. So how do we actually heal the mother would we have to begin to face the fear we have to begin to face the trauma. We have to begin to face the rage. We have to begin to face the grief. And I invite us to do this in ways that feel safe that feel supported and that feel held. The more that we allow ourselves to actually feel in our bodies in our emotions, the more we can begin to heal. We are used to numbing and disconnecting ourselves from these realities and kind of dismissing the fact that these things happened in the past and they don't really relate to us in the same way. But actually, I believe that they do. So I'm challenging us today to not numb out these ways not to disconnect and not to pull back, but to actually go deeper and to go to the source. I'm sharing now a quote from Resma Menachem, who is the author of a book called my grandmother's hands, which speaks about racialized trauma and the ways that we can heal. And he shares this powerful quote. The best things each of us can do, not only for ourselves, but also for our children and our grandchildren is to metabolize our pain and to heal our trauma. When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants via healthy DNA expressions. In contrast, where we don't address our trauma, we may pass on to future generations, along with our fear, our constrictions, our pain. So what are the ways that we can actually heal. And so I want to bring you back to the levels of wounding that I said at the beginning, you know the personal, the societal, the spiritual and the global, and I'm going to answer each of those with ways that we can heal. Healing the self, right, healing the personal mother wound. So actually looking through our own lives, looking through our own habits and bringing a sense of compassion and awareness to what limiting stories am I holding on to. What memories are being activated and played out in my own lifeline. So can I honor my wound. How can I begin to honor my cycle and to move through life in a way that is honoring and health affirming for myself as a woman. Right. So where are the mother wounds. How is this showing up and how can we begin to address them. That is the question that I begin with, you know, if I was working on a one to one basis we would begin with this kind of question and an introspective reflection to be able to map how this is manifested for you personally and how we can begin to support that healing, you know, in your life right now. So the second way is to actually start to begin to heal that mother line, right. So some people speak of this as ancestral healing. It's becoming aware of what is being carried on of what is still activated of what is still being replayed, and to address that with a sense of forgiveness to bring a sense of compassion awareness to that. And to speak what needs to be spoken, you know, often our mother's grandmother's generations didn't have space to voice these things. We do, and we can use our voices to share what's happening for us and to also reconnect with the generations that are still alive if there is an opportunity to do that. So it's really them bringing that healing to the familial plane and and put it in the context of what we're carrying, you know, through the mother line. Third is healing our relationship with God or spirit as mother feminine. And I think this is a really fundamental change. So my daughter's five years old, and since she's been born, we speak about God as she right. And just to see the difference that that makes in her expression of how she relates to to God in an active way. It really changes being of being a female herself, right. And the fact that she can see herself in that image. The replacement of the feminine in the Godhead is essential for wholeness wholeness in humanity. That's going back to the circle of sacred book that I mentioned at the beginning, and I, I think there is a real power in being able to do that. The fourth is coming back to our connection to Mother Earth. So honoring the planet, healing the planet, healing the earth and connecting to the earth through honoring rituals through reduction of behaviors that harm the earth through an understanding and a lived sense that we are extensions of the earth and that we can always feel at home on the earth. And so a lot of my work with room therapy is working with earth energy, you know, using the elemental medicine to actually anchor women into what that means. And then we've been taught to have an aversion to the earth, you know, the soil, the actual physical earth being something that we disconnect from and want to, to, to push away, and I begin the healing with actually embracing that. So some of the modalities that I personally have used on my own journey and that I offered to women that I support and work through is using writing, journaling as a healing practice to actually bring onto the page. So some of the things that we felt unable to voice, and to begin to speak to ourselves in the voice of the great mother. Right. If we were to tune into the love and reassurance that that mother figure that maybe we did have and maybe we didn't have. What would that voice actually say, and to actually create space where we can speak to ourselves in that voice that is literal remothering. Right. So it's actually addressing the body level, the somatic practices. So the ways that we move our bodies, the way that we allow emotion to pass through the ways that we allow the anger, the rage, the grief to be metabolized and then to support those move those emotions to pass through the body through movement. So I do what I call soul flow, which is a practice of feminine nonlinear movement to really allow women to feel what that feels like to allow it to come up and then to allow that to move through. So we need to honor the womb through positive lifestyle changes, the ways that we eat the ways that we breathe the ways that we care for ourselves. And any ways that we see that we're complicit in patriarchy to begin to kind of call ourselves out on those behaviors. So for example, rest is one of the key pillars that I talk about I use and I work with women. The resistance that comes up to rest really displays all of these internalized patriarchal values that have been placed on us about our bodies only being worthy to be productive. You know, and feeling like rest is something we need to earn, for example, like, we're worthy of rest because we're born because we're alive because we're breathing. So without going on a tangent, rest people. And rituals, you know, rituals of forgiveness I work with rituals as a way to create sacred space in our lives, and to bring intention and healing to areas that have perhaps got stuck. So there are myriad of of traditions and spiritual spiritual rituals that you can use things like cutting the cord, things like fire release ceremonies. I don't have space to go into all of them here today but I would have done one of those in person, had we been together in a circle which I hope we can do one day soon. And then lastly, actually creating space to connect in sisterhood with other women who are on a similar healing path with women who understand what the mother wound is and who can, in a loving way reflect back to you, what it looks like to begin healing that. And to create space for other maternal figures to to be connected to in your life, whether those are elder women women who carry that kind of wise women energy, whether that's ancestrally actually opening to connecting to a nourishing healthy mother relationship. So all of this leads to what I feel is our most important calling as women on this planet right now, which is to break this cycle of toxicity to sever the things that have been holding not only us back, but our previous generations back, and to consciously remother and reparent ourselves and our inner child. And if we are mothers and we feel the call to become mothers one day to bring this healing forward in the ways that we parent in the ways that we mother, our children or our potential children. So whatever is unhealed will get revealed, and we have the opportunity to do that. So I want to close with a quote. And this is again from Antonella Samsoni. And she says pregnancy and childbirth are a crucial time for parents to heal, since they reactivate any unresolved issues which left untreated develop into more complex chronic conditions and even more complex chronic conditions. So, I hope that you've seen here how I've been able to bring some nuance and some complexity to the ways that we speak about the mother wound, specifically as women of color as black and brown women, and how we have an obligation and opportunity as space to begin to break this cycle and to heal the mother wound. So to open to questions we have 10 minutes. I will put in the chat box connections to me if you want to follow up with anything that you don't feel able to share in the chat box right now, which I am more than happy to pick up this conversation with. So I'm just going to put this here. I'm going to put here my email, my website which is someone with journey.com, the podcast which you had an excerpt from which is the summer podcast, which is available on all platforms, where we go into these kinds of conversations and I'm also on Instagram at So, I think I need to hand over to Stephanie to actually, oh, no, I can see the questions. I can see the questions. Okay. Okay, so give me a second while I read these. Okay, I'm going to read that out. I was adopted when I was 12 weeks old. I recently started the journey to find my birth mother since I gave birth myself this year. Finding a lot is coming up for me around my own past and my own history. How can I support myself in here through this. So that was an anonymous attendee. First of all, I completely feel and send you compassion and love on this journey. I completely sense into how much is brought up where if you haven't had a connection with your own birth mother to then move forward in your own parenting journey does inevitably bring up a lot of questions, a lot of unanswered questions. So I would begin to lean into anything that you do know, and to begin to extend compassion to the situation if you are aware of obviously what happened of why you was in adoption, and also to kind of bring the focus back into the people and the, the, the women who were in a, in a mother like figure for you. And so there is, there is obviously the importance of connecting down the actual motherline biologically, but we can begin that healing with opening up to receive from mothering energies like I said at the end of that talk that present themselves So to have these conversations with your adoptive mother, and I'm sure she will also be going through a grief of, you know, how she can be there for you. And so that is a conversation that I think. Yeah, has a real opportunity to, to offer deep healing for yourself and for your child, you didn't say which end your child was but congratulations. I'm going to move on to the next one. Do you go about getting over the initial fear. There's oftentimes I want to embark on a journey of healing, nurturing and returning myself to myself, but feeling like my own motherline has been severed and feeling unable to be grounded in this sense, makes everything seem more daunting. Any book recommendations for this. Yes, so I want to share the books again that I have used just to kind of support this talk. And I, I want to also say that this, this is not easy work, right. I think in a lot of circles, healing has become like a trend, like it's, it's, it's not an overnight thing. It is a moment by moment, offering of self compassion and love, and allowing that to then speak louder than the fear, right. So you know that saying of where are they coming from love or from fear, gently and gradually and with support and guidance if you're in a position to be able to invest in someone like myself who actually does this work to hold a safe container for you to be able to go at a pace that feels gentle tool and to only do what you're ready to do when you're ready to do it, and to always come from this place of, of love and compassion and forgiveness for yourself, and for all those who are involved. So there's one more, which I think we have time for. But before we do, I'm going to mention the books. So, working with parents and infants. This was a mind body integration approach. That was by Antonella Samsung, which has been really pivotal in practical ways that women with children can actually begin the healing through touch through tone, through gaze through attention. And she brings up some fascinating statistics on the ways that mother wounds, she doesn't call it a mother wound but I perceive it as a mother wound show up in the difficulties that we have through birth, through breastfeeding and the very real connection between the psycho soma, which is the mind body. And that book really helpful. Resma Menakim. I'm going to type that in as well. Hold on. See. Resma Menakim. He was the one who spoke about racialized trauma. His book is called My Grandmother's Hands. And it's really helpful in understanding practical ways again that we can move trauma through the body. I'm going to read that here. And who else did I use? Queen of Fua, Sacred Women. Thankfully Queen of Fua has been around for years. But she's now got quite a lot of media attention. So there is a lot available of her work, Sacred Women. And that's a guided room journey. So, hopefully that helps. This is the first time I've had such a meaningful presentation about the mother wound that speaks to me personally. I cannot thank you enough for opening my mind to this. My question, you're welcome, by the way, my question is how do you negotiate the pressures of work, patriarchy, racial prejudice and all of these when attempting to deal with a mother wound. I struggled with these quietly and more or less given up, even to the point of healing. Sorry, my daughter will be five years old next year. Yeah, this is the question, right? And I think the thing that I begin with when I'm working with a woman one to one is that the healing can't be the thing that happens at the bottom of the list. I need to cover this. I need to show up for that. I need to, you know, answer to this person. I need to answer this person. And then by the end of that, I'm going to show up for myself. To me, that needs to be flip reversed. And I think often specifically in motherhood we find ourselves at the bottom of the list anyway, right. So we need to be able to feel into what that would be like if we put ourselves at the top. And that is a reclamation of our sovereignty, right, that's saying with our actions with our intentions that my healing is worth my time that I'm actually going to show up for this. And in any way that I can, I'm going to send to my healing and what I'm doing. So is there a way that I can work that is softer to my energy? Is there a way that I can say no to things that are taxing me and draining me of energy? Is there a way that I can look at the relationships around me and start to nurture the ones that are supporting and nurturing and elevating my essence and my energy and move away from the ones that are toxic and are reactivating these wounds, right. So it's a holistic approach and that's why what I do is, is a kind of life overhaul. It's not one thing. It's not one time. It's an ongoing all the time conversation that we have to be having with ourselves and to keep bringing in the voice of the mother, which is really just a voice of love, really, to kind of say to ourselves where are we moving from when you make these choices. You know, when I go for that food, when I do that thing, am I disconnecting or am I opening to more healing? So I hope that's helpful as a way of being able to reprioritize ourselves. I'm conscious of time. I see there are more questions in the box and I'm so grateful that you guys are engaging and have resonated with the presentation. It's really good to continue for a few more minutes, guys. Let me know. Okay, I think, I think we can go for a few more minutes. Okay, brilliant. Thank you for such a wonderful presentation. This is from Yael. You touched upon disease in the body. Can you give any examples of how this can manifest. So this was when I was speaking about how the collective wound shows up in the high rates of diseases that show up in the womb, literally. So the PCOS, the endometriosis, the high number of black women who suffer with fibroids. What I see is that because sometimes the generation before us have also been dealing with those diseases but haven't had space or knowledge or an ability to be able to invest in services or support, there is the sense that, well, the parents generation did that and they got through it and they still have their children and they still did what they needed to do. But actually, there is an opportunity, like I keep saying, to really understand that the ways that we've been coping are not healthy for us. The ways that we've been surviving are not healthy for us. So starting to look at the foods, the activities, the habits, and then starting to look at the actual internal conversations and dialogue. You know, often I see that women who are experiencing some of these diseases aren't aware of how this connects to pain that didn't begin with them. Right. And so the more that we can bring an awareness to it, the more that we can begin to heal it. I have seen women who have been told that they will never conceive who've done five rounds of IVF become pregnant naturally because we have shifted things on a spiritual energetic level, which then goes on to have an impact on their bodies, on their wounds, and to actually begin to honour the womb and to centre the womb is a practice and a journey. And so I see that play out and I see women heal and I see women conceive, right. But even for women who aren't on a motherhood journey, I have said that, you know, this talk was open to women who are not mothers and who aren't intending to be mothers. The healing is for ourself first and foremost. Okay, one last question. Last year, I had my first ayahuasca experience and what came up was the relationship with my mother. The feeling of being disconnected from her neglected and misunderstood by her as I transitioned from my teenage years into a young woman, not having any strong female bond support growing up has resulted in me having trust issues towards women. This very much has carried on until today and I wonder what I can do to heal this without hurting my own mother with the realities of how she has affected me of how her mothering has affected me. Yeah. Okay, so ayahuasca has a way of doing that for sure. And I think it's a massive revealer. And so the fact that you was given the opportunity to kind of see that I think is the amazing place to be able to begin. And it sounds like you're really clear on the results that has had. So for some people, sometimes the struggle is kind of linking the pain to the manifestation, but it sounds like you're quite clear on how that has played out for you. So the first thing that I would do is kind of look out into what stories have been played out. So you say like in your relationships with other women. So what is the story that is being played in your own mind about why women might not be safe or why women might not be trustworthy and then begin to extend to yourself the antithesis. So through affirmations through movement through guided journaling and intentional writing begin to speak into your life, the truth that you want to see reflected in the women around you. So often we can see reflected around us, you know, the lack, right. And I always see that as an indication for what we need to give to ourselves. So I would begin with that. I really hope that serves you. So questions have closed. We're a few minutes over but I am so grateful for your time. I'm grateful for your engagement with this, with this deep conversation it was really a struggle for me to see how I could fit this into such a short space and time because it is very complex and it does go deep as so many of you have felt. I'm just going to read a comment in the box. Thank you for your wonderful presentation. You shared your view on the status of women in Abrahamic religions and how religion has reinforced the negatives way. The negative ways women have seen themselves. I wish to say that there are plenty of other examples in all Abrahamic religions that prove a different experience coming from a Muslim culture. I can relate to many Sufi women and Hagar who struggle formed the very core of the hard program which this strong woman, a slave woman of color, practically a single mother had the faith and strength to survive. Thank you for sharing that. Yes, I didn't mean to make a broad sweep stroke. Thank you for this comment. Obviously Christianity is the thing that I'm most well versed with. But I think our job is to actually seek out these examples. And if we see these women who are being elevated and serve as an example of strength and perseverance and overcoming of course, like elevates, shares, celebrate, that is amazing and hopefully gives us that that feel. Thank you for attending this event guys. I need to remind you that the next class which is starting now in the so as virtual film festival is the film masterclass with if to call Dadi and Minu go. There is a link that's in the in the box and you can click on to that. I really hope you go and to enjoy the rest of this festival. Thank you again to so as for inviting me to speak. If anybody had questions that I didn't manage to answer or comments I didn't manage to see and you want to connect with me I've put my contact details in the box above and I look forward to hearing from you or sending you much peace, much blessings and much healing. Take care.