matresence

Birthing is a woman’s organic opportunity to become empowered through a challenging, physical encounter with the forces of life and death. A birthing woman actually stands on the edge of life and death, at the doorway between them, and (in service to the race) brings a new soul from there to here. What could be more shamanic than

Matrescence. ‘The process of becoming a mother, which anthropologists call “matrescence,” has been largely unexplored in the medical community,’ Sacks writes. ‘Instead of focusing on the woman’s identity transition, more research is focused on how the baby turns out. But a woman’s story, in addition to how her psychology impacts her parenting, is

The truth is that motherhood is a hero's journey. For most of us it's not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn't know was there.

Unlike other cultures, which treat becoming a mother as a major, traumatic life crisis, with special social rites and rituals, Western societies had been failing to recognize matrescence as a major transition: a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures, a transition that can make women ill, a transition in

Over the first year of his life, I deeply reflected upon the connections between birth, breath, and death. After breathing my way through fear, I found myself in a place of profound and visceral love, the most precious of life’s gifts. Motherhood is its own threshold.

Every new mother begins as a child-mother. A child-mother is old enough to have babies and has good instincts in the right direction, but she needs the mothering of an older woman or women who essentially prompt, encourage, and support her in her mothering of her children.

It didn’t surprise me to read that researchers at the University of Massachusetts found, in a synthesis of literature on working mothers, that matrescence was associated with enhanced knowledge, skills and capacity. They found evidence that it “strengthened women’s mindset, willpower, and overall emotional intelligence.”[7] Nothing that I had

You might also affirm: I Am a procreator (pro-creator) of children and of other “children,” including “brainchildren.” I bring good things to life. I Am life-affirming, earth-loving, and life-giving. My ability to procreate, co-create, and pro-create (be proactive in acts of creation) are my most prized gifts and powers, and I treat them with