What is the spiritual side of abortion? Why the 2019 Alabama abortion law brings up important questions about what it really means to be “pro-life” in the now age …
“We must give every person the best chance for a quality life and a promising future.”
This is the #WTF closing line from Gov. Kay Ivey, the WOMAN who signed this week’s controversial Alabama abortion law, in her statement about the act. For me, it sums up everything that is so utterly illogical about this move—because on no level whatsoever, does the Alabama Human Life Protection Act actually promise mothers and the families who may be affected by it a “quality” life or a “promising” future.
On an entirely practical level, Alabama is the 6th poorest state in the US, with 17.2% of Alabamians living below the poverty line (the national average is 14%). Given that the people most likely to be affected by this law are also the poorest, many souls entering the world as a result of this bill, will be pre-destined for a life of poverty-induced suffering.
On a broader scale, over-population is one of the main drivers of climate change (see yesterday’s IG post on over-production / over-consumption). The future is already looking pretty grim for future generations, as we begin to experience what is only the tip of the (rapidly melting) iceberg when it comes to the devastating extreme weather events that are set to become our new normal.
And on a more numinous tip, the more unprepared, unsupported, and unwilling mothers, the more children with more generational trauma keeping them locked in cycles of suffering—and the LESS fully autonomous women, bringing our Universal, life-force, mother energy to other areas of life (something I discuss at length in Material Girl, Mystical World).
Fuck! It makes you wonder WHY Republican law-makers are so anti-abortion—the answer to which appears to be the religious roots of the pro-life lobby. Ban contraception, abortion (oh, and homosexuality while you’re at it), and more Catholic or Christian babies means more power (literally, more people taking up more land + resources) to the Church. Which brings us full circle, to a completely outdated and reactive response to an underlying xenophobic fear of our inevitable cross-cultural evolution.
I had my abortion at age 24, and I am so fucking thankful that a) being British meant I got easy access to a free procedure, no questions asked, and that b) I knew from age 5 that I didn’t want to be a mom, meaning it was not a tough decision for me to opt not to have my baby. I have thought about them sometimes, questioning whether it was selfish of me to deny another soul a life—something that came up when I did a family constellations therapy session with Marine Seleneé.
Marine believes that each and every soul, whether carried to term or not, has its own karmic role in our lineage—and that those we “abort,” as well as those who miscarry—are doing their own work. In my case, I truly believe that I am a “pattern breaker” for the woman + mother wounds that have been carried down my family line (why I knew so young that motherhood was not for me), and that my unborn child played their own role in ending this cycle of trauma.
This week’s move of Mars (conflict, courage, progress) into Cancer (motherhood, women’s issues, lineage), sets the stage for a passionate, angry, and deeply HONEST, response to this latest outrageous violation of human rights. Consider: what does it REALLY mean to be “pro-life” in the now age? How can you enact this in your day-to-day? Questions we all need to be asking ourselves on a level that goes beyond the surface, and gets into the womb of the matter.
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Donate directly to women seeking abortions in Alabama state at yellowfund.org.
The “special bond” we have with our moms can also feel like the most challenging relationship of our lives. Here six Moon Club members share what’s been the most healing thing for them and their moms …
Alexandra and I with our New York Moon Club members. Photo: Caitlin Mitchell
The last time I went home to England to visit my mom, things were tense. She was upset that work commitments meant I was unable to visit at the same time as my brother and his baby boy. With me in the US and him in Berlin, she loves nothing better than having us all together like a normal happy family.
But our family has never been “normal” (whatever that means). I’m not going to write all the details here, but tragic circumstances, as well as emotional and geographical distance, mean that and my mom, and my brother, and I are kind of it.
Now I have a little nephew, our unit has grown by one, and time together is even more precious. So, I get why she was upset. Upset which spilled over to me, and which found us, barefoot and in our bathrobes, engaged in a 2.5-hour deep-dive in her kitchen the second morning of my visit.
We hadn’t even had our morning tea. But when she asked me, “are you okay?”, I decided not to reply with the grumpy shrug or tight-lipped smile that I have used throughout my life to avoid getting into a fight. I decided to tell her the truth of exactly what I was feeling. Which was pretty pissed that I was getting all the blame for apparently messing up our family time.
This opening led us on a journey of tears and rage and resentment, and into the depths of our family history. I learned things about my mom, and her mom, and the lineage of women in my family that I had never known. Mental illness, lost children, abandonment. I was also able to see how different we are, my mom and me, and how we were playing out old, outworn family patterns without even realizing it.
I said my piece and she said hers. All for it. And it hurt so much. But, finally, it was the TRUTH. We stood facing each other afterwards, two human women, like we were seeing each other fully for the first time. Ragged and scooped-out, but also complete and whole. Healed.
In astrology, our mother is represented by the Moon. Also showing how we mother others, the Moon is a reminder that our feeling self is sort of like the mother of us—sometimes fierce and frightening, but always guiding us towards what’s best for us. Not that it always feels that way.
In honor of Mother’s Day, and the conflicted feelings we often have about this most intimate of relationships, six Moon Club members share what has been the most healing thing for their relationships with their moms. PLUS we’re offering 50% off annual memberships through midnight May 13th 2018. Click HERE for more.
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// Jerico Mandybur, Editorial Director, Girlboss.com and presenter,the Self Service podcast I think Gloria Steinem said, “the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” For my mum and I, the truth first almost broke her. It was only when I was in my early twenties and suffering severe depression that one truth from my childhood emerged; one of sexual abuse, neglect and violence. It hit her hard—the complicity, guilt, my anger, all of it. Everything was instantly cast in a new light. But standing in the light of the truth intrinsically changed us. Our mistakes were laid bare and there was nothing left to do but forgive ourselves and start over. We’ve been walking a healing path ever since. The healing never really ends, but that’s not the point. It’s imperfect, like all of us.
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// Chantelle Brown, councillor and meditation coach, Chantelleerica.com The most healing thing for me and my mom has been our ability to reconcile past hurts. About a year ago, I was visiting her back home, sitting in the kitchen, and talking about the work we were doing with Moon Club. At the time, I was working to deconstruct all the systems I had put in place to tuck away my inner most feelings. Growing up, I always had the impression that I felt things too deeply. I would weep at Feed the Children commercials and ask my mom what we were going to do to solve the hunger crisis in Africa. She always seemed baffled! Eventually I learned how to suppress these intense emotions, but now I wanted to work on my ability to live comfortably within my own skin as a woman.
As I spoke about how empowering it felt to begin to accept myself fully, my mother told me that she never found anything wrong with the feelings I expressed as a child. She went on to open up about the sorrow in her own life. How, experiencing the loss of her grandmother meant she encountered tremendous grief at a young age, going on to conditioned herself to be emotionally closed off. Bearing witness to the story her early life was the biggest gift. It has transformed our ability to be vulnerable with each other. Now I’m happy knowing I’m not the only person in my family who feels things deeply. In fact, I can proudly say “I get it from my mama!”
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// Ayesha Ophelia, Founder, The Girlfriend Manifesto Laughter. Just like many mothers and daughters, we could annoy each other with our silence. But when we found something funny the roar of our laughter connected us so deeply. Although my mom passed away three years ago, I can still feel her presence the strongest when I cackle about something inappropriate. We healed through our laughter. We remain in each other’s consciousness through laughter to this day. ***Ayesha’s Symposium of Wild Hearts is launching June 1. Click HERE to learn more!
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// Marine Sélénée, Family Constellations therapist Writing my book The Movement. I had never found the strength and courage to tell my mom about the sexual abuse that happened in London when I was 13. I guess I wanted to protect her. My mother is a strong woman, but often doesn’t know what to do with her emotions. Her way of dealing with difficult situations was either to lock herself in a room or to go silent. It drove me crazy! As a result, I’ve always held back from telling her the truth about my life.
I think this helped me to become strong, to learn to count on myself. But, that’s another topic! Writing and self-publishing my book allowed me to get closure with this trauma. I knew she was going to read it but having worked on my own healing for ten years, I also knew that no matter how she reacted, I would be able to handle it. Finally, my mother knew what happened and I felt safe to share it with her. I was her daughter again.
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// Gabriela Herstik, author, Craft: How to Be A Modern Witch “Taking our own time and growing and finding space within ourselves has allowed us to communicate with honesty and compassion, out of a place of stillness and not reaction. Writing my book about witchcraft has also been really healing for us because she’s been able to learn and understand my spiritual practice and how it’s such an important part of my life. Not only have her misconceptions about the craft cleared up, but she’s been more understanding of my journey, and adopted some of my practices into her own life. The internal work we’ve both been doing has let us get closer to one another and allowed our relationship to deepen. We’ve always been close and now it’s at another level and I’m so thankful for it.
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// Sabrina Crockett, Queen of Operations, Moon Club My momma and I have grown together, held each other up when we both needed it, leaned on each other in light and dark times. Like any relationship though, it has not always been EASY—oh no! I did not grow up in the healthiest of households, and I felt myself becoming resentful and angry as I moved into early adulthood. I could have kept walking down that path, blaming my mother for everything. For my childhood circumstances, for passing on generations of trauma. I could have chosen to see what was lacking, instead of all the love that was also there.
But I didn’t want to! So I picked up a copy of Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life and started on my own path of healing, forgiveness and love. It has been a journey! There have been tears, purging, hugs, laughter, happiness and more with my momma. Whenever I feel feelings of anything but pure love bubbling up, I now remind myself “she did the best she could with what she was given.” And WOW what a game changer. Feel free to use this over and over as I do to remind yourself that we are ALL doing our best.
Check out our Moon Club community HERE and get 50% off all annual memberships through midnight May 13th 2018 HERE.
This week, purging and clearing have been the themes of my mystical life…
I experienced an energetic breakout. Okay, this sounds like it’s gonna be about some radical consciousness shift resulting from a mind-blowing new healing technique…but actually it’s the tale of an aggressive outbreak of pimples in my mystical life. Ew. Gross. I know. But please bear with me, as these aren’t just any old pimples – I believe they are the result of an ongoing energetic detox.
Because WTF. I’ve been eating cleaner than ever since going full vegan and cutting out all alcohol over a month ago. As a result (I’m just guessing here) I’ve been sleeping like a baby, and experiencing “perfect” digestion for the first time in like forever. I’ve also been taking my supplements, letting all kinds of emotional s*** go, and feeling light of spirit and supremely optimistic about life – all the ingredients, surely, for radiant skin. And yet, not since my early teens have I seen zits like these!
It felt like time to consult facialist to the Numinati, Britta Plug, who brings a deep level of energetic healing to her sessions. My question: could this bout of extra clean living actually be the cause of my skissues (skin issues?) In a word: Yes! “We know that trapped emotional energy can cause sickness and disease, so it makes sense that we might actually see or feel it coming out,” she explained. “And if it’s really deep stuff, this could get a little gunky.”
In Ayurvedic medicine, she said, it’s also believed that the skin is the final frontier for toxins leaving the system – “once it’s showing up on the skin, chances are it’s been going through an internal process for a while” (i.e. affecting digestion, sleep, mood, etc). All of which made me feel WAY better about my current pizza face. In fact, I’ve even been able to embrace the pimples as evidence the deeper emotional clearing I’ve been doing over the past few months is working! Here are some tips Britta gave me for speeding up the process:
– Dry body brushing and Epsom salt baths – to help the lymph system clear that shiz out faster – A Manuka honey mask – mix half a teaspoon mixed with water, spread on the skin and leave for up to an hour to speed up the healing process – Accupuncture and massage – to keep the chi flowing, and assist the energetic detox further
I went on a healing hang date. As in, rather than do dinner or a yoga class as an excuse for a gossip with my Goddess gang, we got together to do a Family Constellation. It was my friend Alexandra’s idea. “I need to do a Constellation very soon. Venus retro has been kickin’ my butt, forcing me to really clear out and rethink! I would love to do this with you strong lovely women…” went the email. And well, how could we refuse?
You can read about what a Constellation is here, but it’s basically a form of group therapy that gets deep into your family patterns in a totally mystical way. I’ve only ever done it with strangers (not as scary as it sounds), and the results have BLOWN MY MIND. But with two women I know, who know me and elements of my story already, and who I knew I could trust implicitly with whatever came up? Next level.
Of course we bought snacks (our facilitator Marine even baked a vegan lavender cake) and caught up about the other stuff going on in our lives, and the session ended up lasting four hours. Totally recommended next time you and a gal pal are in the market for more than your average dinner date.
I finally Kondo’d my condo. I might actually be the last person on the planet to read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but since I’m about to move (for the fourth time in as many years), and since I <3 tidying up big time anyway (seriously where is the Virgo hiding out in my chart?), I figured it was time to just get on this bandwagon.
And I quickly realized that “magic” is the operative word in the title, plus the reason, I believe, this little book has resonated so strongly with so many gazillions of people. Yes, there have been all the practical benefits (cleaner, neater apartment + A LOT of credit to spend in my local clothing exchange), but here are a few of Marie’s more mystical life lessons:
On tidying as meditation: “The work of carefully considering each object I own to see whether it sparks joy inside me, is like conversing with myself through the medium of my possessions.”
On healing through tidying: “If you can’t feel relaxed in a clean and tidy room, try confronting your feeling of anxiety. It may cast a light on what’s really bothering you.”
On tidying as personal evolution: “To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose.”
On wardrobe reiki: “When we take our clothes in our hands and fold them neatly, we are, I believe, transmitting energy which has a positive effect on our clothes.”
Conclusion? Marie Kondo is a totally witchcore modern mystic. LOVE!
Can a unique form of group therapy that seeks to define your role within your family heal generations-old inherited issues? Ruby Warrington goes swimming into the energy field with Family Constellations therapy…Image: Shane Small
A few months ago, with the help of French facilitator Marine Selenee, I experienced my first Family Constellations therapy session. Held at Marine’s chic studio apartment in downtown Manhattan, there were three other women present, each of whom played a different role in my Constellation, as did I for them. Many emotions were felt, and many tears shed, and afterwards I felt a sense of release, like something generations old had been worked out of my body at a cellular level.
I was instructed not to speak about my experience for two weeks, to give my mind and body time to integrate with the deep energetic work that had been done. And so I sat with my experience and simply watched on, as every area of my existence began to assume a subtly different and more dynamic form, all thanks to a shift in perception about my family situation – and by definition, myself. If our role in our own “family constellation” is at the root of our human experience, it’s what shapes our entire reality. Right?
How does Family Constellations therapy work? Consider this. Depending on your personal belief system, we all choose our parents, choose to be born in a certain place at a certain moment in time. In doing so, we also choose the unique set of circumstances (and issues) that this configuration gifts us to work with as our karmic lesson in this lifetime.
If that’s too much of a deep dive, then think instead about the question of “nature vs. nurture.” Are we born a certain way, or do the circumstances of our upbringing shape us as we grow? Would I be a completely different person if I was born into a different family in a different time and place? Or am I simply “me,” navigating life with the tools I’ve picked up along the way?
Using Family Constellations therapy, Marine works with the latter theory, the idea being that we repeat the negative patterns we see in our parents out of “loyalty” – they’re the people who gave us life after all, our tribe. We want to be accepted, so we want to be like them. But where these patterns go against our true nature is where we get stuck, where we feel pain – and also where we’ll find the biggest assignments for our personal growth.
I defy any soul currently enjoying this human experience not to have a single issue they can’t trace back to their family (see that ancient Chinese proverb; “they f*** you up, your mom and dad”). As Marine puts it; “90 percent of your issues don’t belong to you – and you pick most of these up before the age of six.” A century of psychoanalysis and talking therapy is entrenched in this understanding, and yet Family Constellations therapy seeks to journey beyond words in search of resolutions to these fundamental glitches in our operating systems.
The key lies in performing the surgery required, the severing of our attachment to our family members’ issues, on our emotional body, before the stories our intellect tells us about who, what and why we [*insert whatever your personal debilitating hang-up is here] have a chance to get a look-in; “Once you recognise that your behaviors and beliefs are not your own, it’s possible to see your true self, your own beliefs and purpose, more clearly,” says Marine.
But how, precisely? Before you embark on a mission to meet your own Family Constellation, here’s what you Need To Know…
• Psychotherapist and former Roman Catholic priest Bert Hellinger discovered Family Constellations therapy when living with the Zulu in South Africa, where the modality was used to resolve issues within the tribe.
• A Constellation can be performed by a group or one-to-one, with a facilitator to moderate. It is the facilitator’s job to do most of the talking; participants are simply asked to notice and express how they feel as events unfold.
• The facilitator begins by asking a few questions pertaining to the issue the participant wants to address. He or she then asks the people needed to bring about a resolution to find their place (whatever position feels right in relation to each other) within “the field.”
• The field, usually the space contained within the circle of the group or the room where the Constellation is taking place, represents the energy field where all souls and all generations exist together as pure spirit.
• In a session, actual family members do not need to be present – other members of the group are called on to “perform” these roles (not nearly as awkward or potentially embarrassing as it sounds).
• This may include family members who have passed, or any unborn children who are also part of the participant’s Constellation.
• Once situated within the field, the facilitator may also ask the different “family members” to recite key phrases relating to the issue in question (without ever going into the “story” – what, why, how) – again asking people to identify the emotions connected to these statements.
• Forgiveness may be asked, and apologies offered (again via the facilitator).
• Many tears may flow.
• A resolution occurs when it becomes evident which family member owns which emotion, behaviour or belief, allowing the participant to realize their own power to simply let whatever doesn’t “belong” to them go.
