A firey update

The outpouring of love since my last post, and general boost in my overall health, has been enough to kick my sorry self into a joyful state. So thank you! All is very, very well. In but a few days (July 4 at the very latest) I get to have a baby. What a blessed woman I am.

I've heard lots of mothers say that these last few days of pregnancy are as much a mental effort as anything else. I have really needed some fire in my belly and have felt the energy of the Celtic goddess Brigid close to me. You can read more about her here.

Now, as the energy shifts within me (and also Universally - can you feel it?), I feel ready, relaxed, willing. I look forward to meeting this new little life, who as it turns out will be a water sign just like her mama.

Blessings on your day and to all the joyous gifts waiting to meet you as this energy of joyous abundance surrounds the planet.

Admitting this is really scary...

A snotty cold has been making itself at home in my body now for about a week. Not exactly the ideal birth lead-up that I had been hoping for. I am now 39 weeks pregnant and very teary.

Combined with the utter exhaustion of late pregnancy I have been feeling downright shirty and irritated most of the time. I am finding the energy of my nearly six year old confronting and overwhelming. My beloved is super busy trying to finish everything up at work so he can take a magnificent 6 weeks off after the birth of our baby. But all of it leaves me feeling unprepared somehow for this new arrival. It is not how I imagined I would be feeling or thinking at this amazing point in our lives.

So instead of soildering on, I am sharing. I don't want to. I don't want you or me or anyone to know the truth. Yet, I am opening up to my feelings of vulnerability, my fear that I won't ever go into labour because mind, body and soul won't synch. I am admitting my utter exhaustion.

And even as I do, support comes flooding in from the Universe. Just this very minute my mum calls to say she will fly down at a moments notice, my beloved calls to offer to come home from work to take me to my hospital appointment, I hear a song on the radio that I haven't heard for years that always makes me joyful (I've included it below), a friend shares a powerful image of a pregnant woman that makes me feel strong and brave (above), and text messages start popping up in my inbox from dear friend's letting me know that they are thinking of me.

I begin to feel ready. I begin to feel body, mind, soul uniting. I accept the nurturing and promise to offer it to myself as well as allowing it to flood in from the world around me. And now we have just returned from the doctor and he says that he would be surprised if the baby doesn't come this week. And as a final affirmation of all the beauty and support and wonder around me, a feather flies in through the car window on the way home and flutters around us - even the angels want me to know they are nearby.

Thank you for letting me share (I say this to myself as much as to you). Now I feel like I have come home.

Technicolour Dream Pants or where does joy come from?

Late pregnancy, I am discovering, has me spending lots of time thinking about lots of things.Thinking too much is never a good thing in my experience and yet the mind charges on unrelenting in it's list making and fact finding and guilt inducing task.

This image for example, which I love, has been staring back at me from this post, in draft form, for days now. I really want to share it with you. I don't know why. It just makes me feel... The mind has been looking for a clever way to package it, to attach it to a theme, to make it universal somehow. I've been overthinking it.

During my last pregnancy, what seems like a lifetime ago, and in many ways was, I was in a constant state of what I can only imagine was hormone induced bliss. My external circumstances were certainly far from ideal and sometimes downright scary. Yet I was freakishly relaxed, calm and joyful. This time round could not be more different. I have my beautiful man, our home, domestic bliss, a gorgeous boy so excited to become a big brother. And my moments of joy are few and far between.

What the hell is going on? What is this thing called joy and where does it come from? More importantly, where does it go? 

I have this theory that happiness and joy are different things. Happiness is attached to external circumstances. You feel happiness because of thins thing, or that person etc etc. Joy, on the other hand, is an internal experience.It wells up from within you, often unexpectedly and is not reliant on any external stimuli to engender it. As a result it is often fleeting. It is perhaps the secret to why we are alive - to know joy at all times regardless of the circumstances.

In my last pregnancy I moved much more slowly in the world, I meditated more often, I worked less and I certainly didn't think as much. I was much more present to my interior life than the outside world. The circumstances were rotten but the feeling of joy was abundant.

Suffice to say, this time round I am busy busy busy. I am out in the world in one way or another most of the time. The world I inhabit is wonderful and I am surrounded by love. But the world of my soul, my inside life doesn't get much of a look in.

Aha, I think. Or better yet, aha, I feel.

So here is an image that I want to share with you for no particular earth shattering reason. Other than it makes me feel joy from right down deep in my very big belly. 

Why am I always the one who says sorry?

Self-discovery and pregnancy go well together

What a long time it has been since I last wrote. I attribute it to my pregnancy that whilst wonderful and a joyful state to be in is also exhausting. But I also made a huge discovery that I documented in my previous post, and, well...the discovery and the action to back it up are two very different things. I have been working pretty conscientiously to back myself up - to do the work required to integrate the new knowledge. Undertaking this whilst on the hormonal rollercoaster that is pregnancy has been fascinating to say the least.

A big part of integrating the knowledge that I have spent my life in a fruitless search for approval from others has been in working on my relationship with my best beloved. He is a wonderful, frustratingly patient man who appears to have mastered the rollercoaster of his own emotions. The first place I seem to go when I am feeling in need of an 'approval-hit' is this man. And when I don't get my needy, passive aggressive behaviour met in the way I would like it to be (Or would I?) I get emotional, angry and generally self-righteous.

Awakening to this pattern has been hard and is most certainly ongoing. But when I do recognise it, and it happens much more easily these days, I take responsibility for it. I say sorry. I have been saying sorry a great deal in the last few weeks. And it feels wonderful. The next step is to circumvent the whole process through activating self-approval. Joyful self-discovery continues!

A visit from the almighty Turtle

My totem friend for my time in Osaka - symbolising  wisdom. It personifies Water, Moon, Mother Earth, Time, Immortality, and Fertility. Creation is associated with the tortoise and it is also believed that the tortoise bears the burden of the whole world. Had been trying to conceive for ages when I met the Turtle and within weeks I was up the duff...