I believe motherhood is an initiatory path.

We all enter into motherhood with certain ideals and expectations about what it will look like and what we will be like. While much of life may unfold in alignment with these, much of it does not.

When we begin to lose a sense of who we are, when the plans we so carefully laid out crumble beneath our feet, when we experience deep loss, disorientation, and grief, we may be experiencing these in many different circumstances, yet they all have one thing in common: initiation.

Indigenous cultures the world around have certain enacted initiation rituals when someone of the tribe is going through a life crisis/change. In modern times, our very life crises themselves are the spontaneous initiatory rituals that strip us bare so that we can be born as someone new, again and again. The difficult moments and seasons of life are not something to rise above or just get over so we can get on with life as usual. These are experiences sent to us specifically so that we can let go of what actually isn’t in alignment with our true self and become more of who we came here to be.

We have all gone through so many moment of initiation as mothers. From the journey of conception, to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, the death of a child, the birth of a child, identity deaths and rebirths, breakdowns, sleepless nights, marriage, divorce, single motherhood, a child moving out…these moments are a current that weaves itself through all of our lives. Yet in order to allow an initiation, a deeply painful or disorienting life experience to be integrated, we need to be witnessed, our experience needs to be marked.

This is what I hold the space for. I am here for mothers going through a difficult passage at any end of the continuum, and to bring maps that show that what you are going through is cosmically designed and echoed in ancient stories that have to potential to call us back home to ourselves.

As a way of marking the specific initiation you are going through, I bring some tools to work with on the journey:

I work specifically with the depth psychological concept of individuation, which is our movement in becoming who we truly are. I place motherhood as a specific path of individuation, one in which we, as mothers, go through a series of trials in order to more fully discover who we are.

I also utilize archetypal and psychological astrology in natal chart work and transit analysis. From this perspective, our birth charts are seen as living maps of our psyche that can serve to uncover the deeper layers of our personality and patterns and the ways in which the planetary archetypes manifest into our lives. Additionally, I focus on Pluto transit analysis, tracking the movement of Pluto as it moves across the sky, and seeing the ways in which this is interacting with one’s natal chart. Through this, we can see the cosmic timing of the death/rebirth experiences that moves through our lives, and ways to work with these experiences consciously.

Through all of this, I weave in mythological stories of descent and rebirth to help us see our own stories mirrored in ancient stories. Our lives are part of a much larger cosmic unfolding, one that mothers have been participating in since the beginning. We are a part of that story, and reading our stories reflected in the wisdom of the myths serves to help us remember the deeper patterns moving through us.

None of this makes any of the challenges easier. I have found this isn’t the point in life. Yet something does happen when we can once again honor the difficulties we go through as mothers, understand the ways in which they are working through our lives and what they are asking of us, and mark the passage that helps us and others to see that we are not the same person once we emerge.

We are not lacking in initiations as mothers, that is for sure. What we are lacking is a container needed to bring the initiations we have gone through into their full realization and subsequent transformation.

The work I do is in service of marking the various stages of motherhood as initiatory passages and honoring the death/rebirth process as it moves through our lives.