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For the past three years, I have engaged in a daily movement practice called Non – Linear Movement. It had become my go-to practice, getting me through so many intensely hard times and had helped me to move through trauma I had carried since childhood.
Once I became pregnant however, I couldn’t bring myself to continue practicing, even though I knew my practice could support me in my pregnancy journey. The reasons for this are many and complex. Firstly, I know we’re not supposed to say this out loud, but my pregnancy was not a happy time. In fact, it was one of the bleakest, darkest times in my life, filled with depression, mental illness, hyperemesis gravidarum, carpel tunnel, gestational diabetes as well as overwhelming grief.
For the early months of my pregnancy I had no contact with anyone and I saw no one apart from my partner and sister for two months straight. I was bedridden and in a place of sheer hopelessness. Even looking at a scan of my baby brought up intense feelings that I still feel guilty about today (even though I know I shouldn’t be.)
You may think that stopping all of my practices is completely normal, especially with all that I was going through. But I didn’t stop practicing because I was overwhelmed. I stopped because I knew intimately that my body was asking me to be still.
To be present. To surrender to the process.
And that continuing to practice would take me too far into the underworld.I felt as though I was already in my own personal hell and I didn’t need to be confronted by my situation any more that I currently was.
It sounds cliche, but the single biggest thing I’ve had to learn in my life, over and over again, whether that be during my movement practice or in life, or again during this sacred window of pregnancy, is this…. ‘Letting Go’.
Specifically learning to let go of everything I had previously known or thought to be true.
“So dear one, please tune out the noise and reconnect to who you are and what you need during this sacred window of time. Because the guidance you seek is contained within the portal you are now travelling through.”
This initiation that is pregnancy and birth requires you to bring forward your deepest knowing.
So, I could have written to you about what ‘SHOULD’ do during pregnancy, but the truth is there are already lots of things out there in the world and on the internet about all the things you ‘should’ do. And to be honest, you probably already know most of them. In a nutshell, they tend to boil down to: eat well, keep active, rest, look after your mental health, and prepare for your baby’s arrival.
However, this journey, this initiation that is pregnancy and birth requires you to bring forward your deepest knowing. It requires you to learn, to listen, to trust yourself implicitly, because that is a huge part of how you will become the best parent to your child.
During some of the bleakest times of my pregnancy, I was so desperate to find a guide or a teacher who could help me cross the threshold into motherhood. But, what I have come to realise is ultimately we have to begin by looking within.
Now don’t get me wrong, that’s not to say that there isn’t support out there, or that you have to go through pregnancy alone, because you don’t. By all means, please find all the support you can, whether that be family, friends, a doula, your partner, a counselor, coach or something else. I connected with a woman I have never met who gave me some much-needed email support, and I had some wonderful counseling sessions through a charity, which I will be forever grateful for.
Beyond that though, no amount of help or guidance can take away from the fact that pregnancy is still an initiation.
YOUR initiation to be specific.
And the point of initiations is facing what is before you, walking through the fire, to be forever changed.
To be forged into the mother that you need to be for your child.
So, dear one, please tune out the noise and reconnect to who you are and what you need during this sacred window of time. Because the guidance you seek is contained within the portal you are now traveling through. If you listen hard enough and become still enough you can allow the healing to find your heart. You may not know it now, but this is a key part of your journey.
Countless women before you have taken this journey and countless more will again, after you. No matter how you are feeling now, be it grief-stricken as I was or perhaps joyful and full of love or anything in between, please know that whatever you are going through now IS the pathway designed uniquely for you.
Designed for you to become the mother you are meant to be for the child you are now growing.
Know that you will come through this time with gifts and power that you cannot yet understand.
Practice surrendering to each and every moment, because surrender requires strength and a deep commitment to the unknown.
In all of the grief, joy, sadness, and despair, the panic, elation, tiredness, illness, anger and frustration, this is a time for reverence and surrender.
This is my prayer to you dear one.
Open your heart to all that is.
Because what is before you, you cannot yet know.
In love, power and pleasure to you.
Mina x
Mina Aidoo is a Mama to her son Apollo, and a teacher of the Non – Linear Movement Method, which teaches women how to reconnect to the pleasure and power of their bodies.
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